Updating USDA's Key Foods List for what we Eat in America, NHANES 2011–12

The Nutrient Data Laboratory (NDL) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) uses the Key Foods approach to select foods for nutrient analyses, allowing NDL to concentrate analytical resources on foods that contribute significant amounts of nutrients of public health interest to the diet.The Key Foods approach uses food composition data from the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (SR26) for 14 nutrients of public health significance identified in the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, intake data from NHANES, What We Eat in America (WWEIA) 2011–12, and the USDA Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS 2011–2012) to connect food composition with consumption data. For each food, NDL multiplies the nutrient content by the grams consumed. NDL then ranks all Key Foods for each nutrient and divides the foods into quartiles. The current Key Foods list contains 576 food items, similar to the list generated from NHANES-WWEIA 2007–08,although the number of foods per quartile and rankings of some foodshave changed slightly. Key Foods help NDL provide current, representative data for researchers, policy makers, the food industry, and consumers. This article describes the Key Foods list that NDL developed using data from SR26 and 2011-12 consumption data from NHANES-WWEIA.