Abstract
The New Nordic Diet (NND) is a potentially healthy and sustainable dietary pattern represented by locally available and traditionally consumed foods in the Northern countries. The diet has been commonly examined in adult populations, but less is known regarding its potential associations with overweight/obesity in children. We have previously developed child diet scores measuring compliance to the NND at child age 6 and 18 months and 3 and 7 years. In this study, we aimed to describe child and maternal characteristics and assess potential associations between the age‐specific diet scores and child overweight at 8 years. This study is based on the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), including 14,989 mother–child pairs and uses data from the Medical Birth Registry of Norway (MBRN). The scores measured NND compliance as a total score and categorized into low, medium and high NND compliance at each age point. Using logistic regression models, we investigated the association between each age‐specific score and the odds of overweight at 8 years. In crude analyses, adherence to the NND at 6 months was inversely associated with odds of overweight at 8 years in the continuous score (odds ratio = 0.95, 95% CI [0.91, 0.98]) and when comparing high versus low NND adherence (odds ratio = 0.81, 95% CI [0.70, 0.94]). The association was almost entirely attenuated in the adjusted models. In conclusion, child NND adherence up to 7 years of age was not associated with odds of overweight at 8 years in adjusted analyses.
Highlights
Between 1990 and 2016, the worldwide prevalence of overweight/ obesity among children under 5 years increased from 32 to 41 million (World Health Organization, 2019)
Children categorized with high New Nordic Diet (NND) score at 7 years of age had higher mean NND score at all previous time points compared to the lower NND categories
They were taller than the children who were in the lower NND-adherence categories
Summary
Between 1990 and 2016, the worldwide prevalence of overweight/ obesity among children under 5 years increased from 32 to 41 million (World Health Organization, 2019). Despite an observed plateauing in some developed countries, overweight/obesity still remains one of the major public health challenges worldwide (Olds et al, 2011; Wabitsch, Moss, & Kromeyer-Hauschild, 2014), as the Matern Child Nutr. The first years of life have been increasingly acknowledged as a crucial period for overweight/obesity prevention (Baidal et al, 2016; Pietrobelli & Agosti, 2017), and there is a growing evidence suggesting that dietary patterns laid early in life may shape later eating preferences and track into and beyond childhood (Lioret et al, 2015; Mikkilä, Räsänen, Raitakari, Pietinen, & Viikari, 2005). The authors found that the most studied outcome was weight status, the findings were generally inconsistent
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