Aligning Dietary Intake and Food Purchase Data in United States Older Adults: Insights from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and Circana Consumer Network.

Background: Diet quality is a key determinant of healthy aging, yet fully assessing dietary intake remains a challenge partly because of data limitations and difficulty in integrating information from methodologically distinct datasets. Different nationally representative datasets can offer complementary perspectives: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) captures self-reported dietary intake using 1 to 2 d of 24-h recall, whereas the Circana Consumer Network (CN) is a national retail dataset that records year-long grocery purchases from ∼60,000 United States households. Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate whether dietary intake reported in NHANES 2017-2018 aligns with food purchase trends in CN 2018 among United States adults aged ≥55 y. Methods: We examined self-reported dietary intake of grocery/store-bought foods from 24-h recalls in NHANES ( Results: Mean total HEI scores were modest and comparable across datasets (NHANES: 55.7 ± 0.9; CN: 51.3 ± 0.1; Conclusions: In United States adults aged ≥55 y, grocery/store-sourced intake from NHANES and household grocery purchases from CN showed broadly similar but not interchangeable patterns of diet quality, indicating that purchase data can complement, but not replace, recall-based dietary surveillance. Integrating purchase records with recalls could provide deeper insights into older adults' dietary behaviors and strengthen precision nutrition research.