The Assessment of Cooking Skills and Food Skills and Their Relationship with Nutrition Knowledge, Attitude toward a Healthy Diet and Food Intake: Results of a German Validation Study

There is a lack of validated assessment instruments that capture all facets of cooking skills (CS) and food skills (FS). The goal of this study was to validate the German version of a questionnaire to assess a broad range of CS and FS and to examine its relationship with nutrition knowledge, attitude toward a healthy diet, and food intake. The German version was developed using forward-backward translation. An online survey was completed by students (n = 141), participants from the general Swiss population (n = 50), and nutrition experts (n = 18), including the CS and FS items along with nutrition knowledge, food frequency items, attitude toward a healthy diet and sociodemographic variables. The reliability and construct validity were examined. Results: For all of the samples, Cronbach's alpha was between 0.85 and 0.88 for CS items and between 0.84 and 0.86 for FS items. The scales were strongly correlated (r = 0.60-0.77, p < 0.01). Nutrition experts showed higher confidence in their CS and FS than students and the participants of the general Swiss population (p < 0.001). CS and FS correlated weakly to moderately with practical nutrition knowledge, attitude toward a healthy diet, and the diet quality index. The German version is an efficient, valid, and highly reliable instrument that seems sensitive to changes. FS, compared to CS, might be more important for a healthy diet.