because time and resources are expended in a dietary assessment. If its only role were in determining program eligibility, yield of benefit would be central. However, the dietary assessment has extra value since it forms an essential part of the intervention package.

State and local WIC programs use a variety of criteria for dietary risk in the certification of participants. Most agencies report assessing dietary quality for women using categories of moderately inadequate, severely inadequate, deficient, or excessive for energy intake, nutrient intake, or food group consumption. Recently, some states have proposed the use of hunger of food insecurity as a dietary risk criterion.

This chapter places dietary risks into three categories: (1) inappropriate dietary patterns, (2) inadequate diet, and (3) food insecurity. The first two categories are consistent with nutrition risk criteria specified by the WIC program. Food insecurity is a proposed new category. A list of the risk criteria used by state WIC agencies appears in Table 6-1. A summary of broad cate