hei: Calculate Healthy Eating Index (HEI) Scores

title: 'hei: Calculate Healthy Eating Index (HEI) Scores' authors: - name: Tim Folsom orcid: 0000-0002-8647-5810 affiliation: 1 - name: VP Nagraj orcid: 0000-0003-0060-566X affiliation: 1 affiliations: - name: University of Virginia index: 1 date: 23 August 2017 bibliography: paper.bib

Summary

The Health Eating Index (HEI) is a dietary metric originally designed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) to gauge adherence to the United States Dietary Guidelines[@hei]. The NCI distributes SAS macros for calculating individual HEI scores. hei is a package that implements the HEI scoring algorithms in R[@R], allowing users without SAS licenses to perform these calculations for individuals across several years of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) studies. The package has been unit tested against HEI scores computed using the SAS functions to validate its performance. Internally, hei depends on the nhanesA package[@nhanesA] to retrieve necessary data for scoring. HEI scores can be widely applied in the fields of epidemiology, public health, nutrition and beyond[@social_support][@tinnitus][@age], particularly when combined with additional publicly available demographic and behavioral NHANES datasets.