Pioneering Data-Driven
Dietary Assessment

In 1982, dietary food frequency questionnaires asked about foods that researchers assumed people ate, not what they actually ate. It was an approach that made every study less accurate than it could be.

At the National Cancer Institute, Gladys Block saw a better way. She analyzed NHANES data to identify which foods are the top sources of nutrients in the American diet. This data-driven approach made dietary assessment more accurate and reproducible. The method is now the standard worldwide and is used in most scientifically-based dietary assessment.

Manual dietary analysis was tedious and error-prone. Gladys Block coded DietSys herself in PL/1, creating the first automated dietary analysis software. The National Cancer Institute adopted it as their standard analysis tool for the next 15 years, and its DNA lives on in their current dietary analysis programs.

When Gladys Block left NCI and the institute discontinued DietSys support, she founded Block Dietary Data Systems (now NutritionQuest) to keep these tools available to researchers.

This became a true family effort. Gladys Block provided the scientific foundation. Clifford Block, a research psychologist, would lead the behavioral components that made our intervention tools successful. Their son Torin would soon lead the technical development, transforming scientific methods into practical tools.

But adults weren't our only focus. We developed validated dietary assessment tools for every pediatric age group—from toddlers (2-7 years) to adolescents (8-17 years). These tools became the gold standard for children's nutrition research.

Our Kids Screeners and questionnaires now power some of the largest pediatric studies in the world, including the ECHO study, the ABCD study, and countless others. When research requires accurate pediatric dietary data, our tools are the solution.

That philosophy inspired ALIVE!. We built it incrementally through multiple randomized controlled trials over 20+ years, learning what actually changes behavior. Clifford Block's psychological expertise, along with collaborators from Stanford, Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research, and other institutions, shaped the behavioral components.

Today, ALIVE! powers diabetes prevention, workplace wellness, and community health programs. Learn more about ALIVE! →