Multiple-Pass 24-Hour Dietary Recall

The Multiple-Pass 24-Hour Dietary Recall is a structured interview method for measuring everything an individual ate and drank in the previous day, designed to maximize completeness and accuracy through several successive passes over the same day. Its definitive form is the USDA Automated Multiple-Pass Method (AMPM), a computerized five-step protocol used in What We Eat in America, the dietary component of NHANES. Validated against doubly labeled water by Moshfegh and colleagues in 2008, the AMPM was shown to reduce the bias in self-reported energy intake that plagues single-pass recalls, and the earlier 5-step protocol was validated against weighed observation by Conway and colleagues. By guiding respondents through a quick list, forgotten-food probes, time and occasion, detailed descriptions and amounts, and a final review, the method turns a notoriously error-prone task into a standardized, quantifiable dietary measurement.