verse populations and may be strengthened by the use of laboratory-based tools to measure exposures and confounding factors, rather than other means of data collection such as personal interviews. In recent years, rapid advances in laboratory technology have made possible the increased use of biomarkers of exposure, susceptibility, and disease outcome in molecular epidemiological research. For example, one area of great potential in advancing current knowledge of the effects of diet on health is the study of genetic markers of disease susceptibility (especially polymorphisms in genes that encode metabolizing enzymes) in relation to dietary exposures. This development is expected to provide more accurate assessments of the risk associated with different levels of intake of both nutrients and nonnutritive food constituents.

While analytic epidemiological studies (studies that relate exposure to disease outcomes in individuals) have provided convincing evidence of an associative relationship between selected nondietary exposures and disease risk, there are a number of other factors that limit study reliability in research relating nutrient intakes to disease risks. First, the variation in nutrient intake may be rather limited in populations selected for study. This feature alone may yield modest relative risk trends across intake categories in the population, even if the nutrient is an important factor in explaining large disease rate variations among populations.

Second, the human diet is a complex mixture of foods and nutrients including many substances that may be highly correlated, which gives rise to particular concerns about confounding. Third, many cohort and case-control studies have relied on self-reports of diet, typically food records, 24-hour recalls, or diet history questionnaires. Repeated application of such instruments to the same individuals show considerable variation in nutrient consumption estimates from one time to another with correlations often in the 0.3 to 0.7 range (e.g., Willett et al., 1985). In addition, there may be systematic bias in nutrient consumption estimates from self-reports because the reporting of food intakes and portion sizes may depend on individual characteristics such as body mass, ethnicity, and age. For example, total energy consumption may tend to be substantially underreported (30 to 50 percent) among obese persons, with little or no underreporting among lean persons (Heitmann and Lissner, 1995). Such systematic bias, in conjunction with random measurement error and limited intake range, has the potential to greatly impact analytic epidemiological studies based on self-reported dietary habits. Note that cohort studies using objective (biomarker) measures of nutrient intake may have an important advantage concerning