Eva Schernhammer receives funding for international dietary screening project

Eva Schernhammer, head of the Department of Epidemiology at MedUni Vienna's Center for Public Health, has been awarded a major grant as part of the Joint Programming Initiative 'A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life' (JPI HDHL). The international project VEGANScreener, coordinated at MedUni Vienna, is developing a tool for the prevention and early detection of nutritional deficiencies in vegans. The primary aim of the VEGANScreener project is the prevention and early detection of nutritional deficiencies in the diets of Europeans who follow a predominantly plant-based diet, with a particular focus on the vegan population. "To achieve this aim, we plan to develop and validate a short, standardised weband app-based dietary screening tool to assess and monitor the food intake of vegans," explains Eva Schernhammer, "and we will take the initial steps towards its application by end-users. When it comes to conducting nutritional studies among vegans, it is particularly challenging to make an accurate and comprehensive assessment of their consumption of vegan and vegetarian foods, such as plant-based milks, algae, calcium-rich mineral water, and meat substitutes." These foods are not all included in the "Food Frequency Questionnaires" (FFQs) of existing cohort studies, such as NutriNet Sante, the Nurses' Health Study or the UK Biobank. It is not therefore possible to evaluate current vegan dietary patterns from these cohorts. In order to achieve the project's research objectives, which include the validation of a novel vegan dietary screener, 400 vegans will be recruited from four European countries (Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Spain).