Washington: There is a close relationship between parent and child diet quality, a new study claims.
According to the researchers at University of Delaware in the U.S, parents need to be careful about their eating habits as this could lead to better strategies to address obesity and related conditions such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Shannon Robson, assistant professor of behavioral health and nutrition and study's lead author said“Unfortunately people are not doing very well in terms of diet quality. Parents had better diet quality than kids, but only by a little bit.”
As per reports by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third of U.S. adults are obese and about seventeen percent of the nation's youth (ages 2-19) are obese.
The study was conducted on 698 parent-child duos and then the analysis was drawn on data to get the better understanding of obesity and related behaviours.
The age of the children were six to 12 years old and all lived in King County, Washington, or San Diego County, California, when the study was done from 2007 to 2009.
To get a sampling of dietary practice, researchers looked at up to three random days of eating data for each twosome, including at least one weekday and one weekend day. More than 98 percent of participants reported three days of dietary data.
Overall, the researchers found that parents had only slightly higher score on both measures of diet quality.
Caloric intake was more similar, with children eating an average of 1,751 calories per day and parents 1,763.
The researchers found parental diet to be the strongest predictor of a child's diet quality.
The two main reasons for poor diet quality among children are too few vegetables and too many empty calories, as suggested by the researchers.
The findings appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
(With Agency inputs)
