*2.3. Assessment of Dietary Intake, Food Consumption and Adherence to the Mediterranean Diet*

The evaluation of eating habits was performed through the Italian version of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) questionnaire, a validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) for the assessment of dietary habits in large epidemiological studies [31,32]. Details have been reported elsewhere [33,34]. Briefly, the FFQ is based on 248 items for which the respondent has to report (1) the absolute frequency of consumption in terms of per day, week, month, or year, and (2) the quantity by selection of pictures showing the portion size as small, medium and large, with additional quantifiers (i.e., "smaller than the small portion" or "between the small and medium portion", etc ... ). Incomplete questionnaires and questionnaires with energy intake less than 800 or greater than 5000 kcal/day were excluded. A specific software (Nutrition Analysis of food frequency questionnaire—FFQ) was used to obtain the average daily amounts of foods (g/day) [31,32] and the energy and nutrient composition of the habitual diet [35,36]. The intake of polyphenols was evaluated using the USDA database [37] in combination with the Phenol-Explorer®database [38], as reported in more detail elsewhere [33,34]. In order to evaluate the adherence to the Mediterranean Diet, the relative Mediterranean Diet (rMED) score was used [39] as described in a prior publication [40]. Briefly, the average daily intake of fruits, vegetables, cereals, legumes, fish, olive oil, meat and meat products, dairy products and alcohol was divided in tertiles and assigned a score of 0, 1 or 2 to the first, second or third tertile, respectively, for the groups fitting the Mediterranean model, whereas for meat and dairy products, we assigned a score of 0, 1 or 2 to the third, second and first tertile, respectively. Regarding alcohol intake, 2 points for moderate intake (i.e., 5–25 g/day for women and 10–50 g/day for men, respectively) and 0 points for a consumption at or below the sex-specific range were assigned. The rMED score ranged from 0 to 18.
