Dietary Assessment in Kidney Disease

Understanding the dietary intake of people with kidney disease is fundamental to addressing their treatment or the prevention or slowing the progression of kidney disease. Several recent guidelines on chronic kidney disease (CKD) vary on recommendations for assessing the dietary intake of patients. Whether the approach to assessing dietary intake is considered warranted is not discussed in these guidelines, so perhaps it is not an issue of the reliability of dietary intake assessment methods but rather one of the origin of the guidelines. For example, the guidelines from the joint National Kidney Foundation Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Clinical Practice Guidelines for Nutrition in CKD are written to be multidisciplinary and include guidelines for dietitians. However, many of the other guidelines for CKD are physician-specific, and obtaining the dietary record is not included in their guidelines, perhaps because physicians do not normally collect this information. In contrast, assessment of dietary intake is a significant practice of dietetics, and dietitians routinely evaluate dietary intake in assessing the nutritional status of patients.