To the editor

In their excellent review, Siniarski and Gajos¹ underlined the immense importance of omega‑3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) in the treatment of patients with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and indicated the potential limitations of the contradictory results of clinical trials. In their conclusions, the authors highlighted actual dietary recommendations for the intake of fatty acids and identified populations that can benefit the most from changes in PUFA intake.

In fact, the profile of consumed fatty acids is more important for the prevention of CVDs than total fat intake.² The risk of coronary artery disease may be reduced by 2% to 3% by replacing 1% of energy intake from saturated fatty acids (SFAs) with PUFAs.³ According to the current guidelines, SFA intake should be reduced to less than 10% of total energy intake, whereas the intake of trans fatty acids should be as low as possible.²

These recommendations should be communicated to all cardiac patients, but the question is: Is there any tool that would enable them to follow these guidelines in practice? And is the information about the dietary source of each fatty acid sufficient without detailed calculation of the fatty acid profile? We may expect that in the future, mobile applications, instead of tedious calculations, will be used to support patients with dietary choices.⁴ Unfortunately, most of the currently available applications have not been validated in clinical settings.

Recently, we performed a comparative validity study of popular mobile applications against the Polish reference method in the assessment of energy and macronutrient content intake.⁵ Our results revealed that the evaluated applications tended to overestimate energy intake, whereas over- and underestimations were observed with regards to macronutrients intake. Thus, we cannot expect that the currently available popular mobile applications will be reliable tools for the assessment of fatty acids intake.

Considering the role and the significance of dietary habits (including fatty acid profile) on cardiovascular risk, there is an urgent need for providing validated, easy‑to‑use, and widely available tools for nutrition assessment. The development and validation of high‑quality mobile applications is of great importance not only for therapeutical reasons (patients with CVDs) but also due to the limited access to dietary counseling and poor nutritional knowledge of the general population.