What did you have for dinner last night? And for breakfast? Did you snack in between? Even if you remember all this, do you recall how much you ate? Was the cucumber sandwich 100g or 150g? How much smoked salmon was on the canapés?

Answering these questions correctly is not just a party trick—it’s essential for understanding the link between diet and health. If we want to know what makes a diet “healthy,” we first need to know what healthy people eat. And as simple as that sounds, it’s anything but—partly because “healthy” is such a subjective term, and partly because measuring dietary intake is a very complicated process.

There are many different ways to find out what people eat – and one of the most common and most reliable methods is the so-called “24h recall”. A researcher asks a participant what they have consumed in the last 24h and uses prompts and structured questions to help participants to remember as much as possible. They are often conducted using web-interfaces such as Intake 24 or MyFood 24. Most people remember reasonably well the last 24h – and with a little prompting and pictures, such recalls can be surprisingly accurate (event though we know of course that eye witness accounts are not always very trustworthy).

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Originally published on Substack.