Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 26, 1993 TAG: 9311260041
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-31 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The General Accounting Office gave no indication to what degree the data supplied by the Agriculture Department's Human Nutrition Information Service may be inaccurate.
The GAO said the department relied too much on undocumented information from industry and other sources, did not monitor laboratories it had contracts with, and allowed too few samples to be used in some analyses to produce mean- The GAO said the department relied too much on undocumented information from industry and other sources. ingful results.
Nearly two dozen federal agencies use the Agriculture Department's Handbook 8 to help guide the content of school lunches, diets for the armed services and menus for VA hospital patients. The government also uses the data to conduct surveys on whether Americans are eating healthy diets.
Dietitians, nutritionists and other health-care professionals also depend on the data, as do other individuals who receive the information through commercial data bases. Many developing countries also use the data.
The Human Nutrition Information Service also lacks specific standards for evaluating food composition data, said the report, which was prepared for the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
Some data has been accepted into Handbook 8 "with little or no supporting information on the testing and quality assurance procedures used to develop the data," the report said.
"For example, data on bacon-cheeseburgers included in Handbook 8 came primarily from brochures provided by fast-food chains," the report said. "The brochures generally did not explain how the nutrient values were determined."
The Handbook 8 and its computer version, the National Nutri- The Human Nutrition Information Service lacks specific standards for evaluating food composition data. ent Data Bank Electronic Bulletin Board, provide 70 items of data on 5,300 food items. The data include a variety of breakdowns of food products.
"They're not saying that [the handbook] is not reliable," said Ellen Haas, the assistant secretary of agriculture for food and consumer services. "What they're saying is because in some instances there is not as much documentation as one would prefer to see that it could be unreliable."
About 85 percent of the information comes from the food industry or scientific journals, with the remaining 15 percent done by contract with universities and food-testing laboratories.
by CNB