sion of foods, and inaccuracies related to the use of food composition tables (IOM, 2000; Lichtman et al., 1992; Mertz et al., 1991). In addition, because a high percentage of the food consumed in the United States and Canada is not prepared from scratch in the home, errors can occur due to a lack of information on how a food was manufactured, prepared, and served. Therefore, the values reported by nationwide surveys or studies that rely on self-report are often inaccurate and possibly biased, with a greater tendency to underestimate actual intake (IOM, 2000).

Because of day-to-day variation in dietary intakes, the distribution of 1-day (or 2-day) intakes for a group is wider than the distribution of usual intakes even though the mean of the intakes may be the same (for further elaboration, see Chapter 14). To reduce this problem, statistical adjustments have been developed (NRC, 1986; Nusser et al., 1996) that require at least 2 days of dietary data from a representative subsample of the population of interest. However, no accepted method is available to adjust for the underreporting of intake, which may average as much as 20 percent for energy (Mertz et al., 1991).

The major sources of current dietary intake data for the U.S. population are the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), which was conducted from 1988 to 1994 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII), which was conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 1994 to 1996. NHANES III examined 30,000 subjects aged 2 months and older. A single 24-hour diet recall was collected for all subjects. A second recall was collected for a 5 percent nonrandom subsample to allow adjustment of intake estimates for day-to-day variation. The 1994 to 1996 CSFII collected two nonconsecutive 24-hour recalls from approximately 16,000 subjects of all ages. Both surveys used the food composition database developed by USDA to calculate nutrient intakes (Perloff et al., 1990) and were adjusted by the method of Nusser et al. (1996). For boron, which is not included in the USDA food composition database, the Boron Nutrient Data-