Assessing the association between diet and cancer was a priority of this study, requiring an accurate means of classifying people according to aspects of their diet. Since the early 1980s food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) have been the method of choice for large epidemiological studies.
When the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study began, there was no suitable, validated FFQ that covered the breadth of dietary exposures expected in the MCCS participants. So our own Food Frequency Questionnaire (which is now available for other research) was developed specifically.