Association of quality and intake frequency of snacks in developing obesity among urban school children

Abstract

Background The double burden of malnutrition is evident in Bangladesh as many recent studies have identified increasing trends in the prevalence of overweight and obesity among children and adolescents. The emerging overweight and obesity problem among them, especially among school-going children, have many facets of behavioral attributes. In urban cities, children of overweight parents having limited exercise and high levels of sedentary activities were identified as the leading cause of obesity among them. One of the immediate causes of the increasing prevalence of obesity and overweight among urban school children is assumed to be the high consumption frequency of energy-dense junk foods available on school premises. Many studies addressed the role of junk food intake behaviour of school-going children on their increasing weight gain in Bangladesh. But the majority of these studies did not elaborate on the role of nutritional quality and consumption frequency of junk foods consumed by these children as their snacking behaviour. The present study was undertaken to find out the causal association between junk food quality and consumption and childhood obesity.

Methodology A total of 246 students aged 11-18 years from four selected schools in posh areas of Dhaka city were studied using a cross-sectional data collection technique. Along with socio-economic and anthropometric variables, a pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect the consumption frequency of snacking and types of snacks foods. The association between obesity and junk food consumption was tested by an appropriate statistical tool.

Findings Among the studied children, 22.0% (n=54) were found obese (> +2SD) while 40.2% (n=99) were overweight (> +1SD) on BMI Z-score. A large number of children (41.4%) consumed commercially available snack foods one-time per day followed by 19.8% of children who took snacks two times per day. The BMI Z-score of the children were found significantly correlated with their frequency of junk food consumption during snacking f (P=0.048) and eating out behavior (P=0.016). Additionally, the BMI of the children was found to be influenced significantly by parents’ education (P=0.002) and nutritional knowledge (P=0.000). Most of the overweight or obese school students belonged to higher-income families.