Healthy Eating Index and Nutrition Biomarkers among Army Soldiers and Civilian Control Group Indicate an Intervention Is Necessary to Raise Omega-3 Index and Vitamin D and Improve Diet Quality.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as an observational study.

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI) can be used to assess dietary quality and adherence to federal nutrition guidelines.

The aim of this study was to assess soldiers' diet quality and nutritional status and compare results to a civilian control group.

Non-parametric analyses were conducted to compare the diet quality and nutritional status of soldiers and controls.

Why It Was Studied

Diet quality and nutrition status are important for optimal health and military performance.

Few studies have simultaneously evaluated diet quality and biochemical markers of nutritional status of military service members.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are teenagers, young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

A cross-sectional study was conducted with 531 soldiers.

A food frequency questionnaire was used to calculate HEI scores.

A blood sample was collected for analysis of select nutrition biochemical markers.

Differences in non-normally distributed variables were determined by using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

What Was Measured

Few studies have simultaneously evaluated diet quality and biochemical markers of nutritional status of military service members.

The subject headings attached to it are Biomarkers, Case-Control Studies, Cross-Sectional Studies, Diet Surveys, Diet, Healthy, Fatty Acids, Omega-3 and Feeding Behavior.

The authors tagged it with the keywords diet quality, healthy eating index, military service members, omega-3 index and vitamin D.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is an observational study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Its findings take up roughly 4 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2020 (Nutrients), a journal based in Switzerland.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.