Validating a dietary survey tool for dogs

What is a food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) and how can one be used in veterinary medicine? At the 2025 American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM) Forum in Louisville, Kentucky, Janice O’Brien, DVM, MPH, DACVMP, and a United States Army veteran, presented a study in which she and a team of researchers sought to validate the semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire used by the Dog Aging Project—a nationwide study on aging and health in dogs.  

O’Brien, currently a PhD student at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine in Blacksburg, Virginia, spoke with dvm360 during the 2025 ACVIM Forum about her research, FFQs, and their application to canine research.

Below is a partial transcript of the interview:

Janice O’Brien, DVM, MPH, DACVMP:So, food frequency questionnaires are something that [are used] in the human research side an awful lot to study how large populations of people might eat. And so, it's kind of exactly what it sounds like.

So, it's what food items [are consumed] and how frequently [they are] eaten. So, for example, it might have a list of different meats—so sausages, pork, bacon within that. And how frequently it's eaten, if it's eaten several times a day, if it's eaten once a day, if it's eaten once a week, etc., and so it's just that frequency for each item.

And then they use that to study, at large population levels, this is where you get those studies that say people that eat more fruits and vegetables or who consume more fiber generally, have, you know, better cardiac outcomes or something like that. That's where those types of studies come from, is from those food frequency questionnaires.

And we wanted to do that on the dog side because, well A) that format is what the Dog Aging Project diet survey is formatted like. So, we wanted to validate, is this accurately recording the information we would like it to be recording?

This transcript was lightly edited for improved clarity.