Why use it?

About the LFPQ

In the French Armed Forces Biomedical Research Institute, we want to ensure soldiers’ health and performance. The LFPQ gives us easy access to soldiers’ eating behaviour in response to different mission environments; and it will help us prevent soldiers from decreasing their operational performances induced by a state of prolonged energy deficit. We used the LFPQ during several missions in Greenland (mars-april 2018, 2019 and 2020) to assess the evolution of food preferences in soldiers exposed to intense cold temperature. We found a shift towards sweet food preferences and we want to use the LFPQ again to inform policy on rationing in extreme environments.

About the future platform

We would like to invest in a digital version of the LFPQ to expand the use of this tool across all mission environments. This will allow us to create recommendations to limit soldiers weight loss and improve their performance and wellbeing during missions. We would need an offline version of the task, that is adaptable, user-friendly, and allows the evaluation of appetite and thirst. The digital Leeds Food preference platform seems promising to us and we look forward to using it in further armed forces missions.

About the LFPQ

We use the LFPQ to better understand why soldiers might under-eat during training and military operations, and overeat afterwards, and to help inform future research aiming to improve food intake in those environments. The LFPQ gives us one way to test what types of foods soldiers are more likely to prefer in different environments. We hope this knowledge will help towards developing rations that are better suited to the preferences of the soldiers operating in different environments. Although it takes time to develop the research needed to substantiate changes in military feeding policy, data from the LFPQ in combination with other data can help build the case for changing feeding policy.

About the future platform

What could help to improve the impact of the LFPQ on military nutrition research would be access to an online platform, a small access fee would be appropriate, containing the task along with a large variety of food pictures that are culturally adapted. It would be wonderful if the data could also be processed and analyzed using that platform. That would be useful to us.