Diet Quality and Satisfaction with Life, Family Life, and Food-Related Life across Families: A Cross-Sectional Pilot Study with Mother-Father-Adolescent Triads.

Berta Schnettler,Edgardo Miranda-Zapata,Gastón Ares,Germán Lobos,Clementina Hueche,Marianela Denegri

doi:10.3390/ijerph14111313

Abstract

Family is a major determinant of children’s and adolescents’ eating behavior. The objectives of the present study were to assess diet quality, eating habits, satisfaction with life, family life, and food-related life in mother–father–adolescent triads, and to identify profiles of families according to family members’ diet quality. Questionnaires were administered to a sample of 300 two-parent families with one child over the age of 10 in the city of Temuco (Chile), including the Adapted Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), Satisfaction with Food-related Life (SWFoL) scale, Satisfaction with Family Life (SWFaL) scales, and questions relating to their eating habits. Positive relationships were found between the diet quality of the family members, particularly between mothers and adolescents. Three family profiles with different diet qualities were identified: “families with an unhealthy diet” (39.3%), “families in which mothers and adolescents have healthy diets, but the fathers’ diets require changes” (14.3%), and “families that require changes in their diet” (46.4%). These findings stress the key role of mothers in determining family diet quality and suggest a positive relationship between diet quality and satisfaction with life.

Highlights

Overweight and obesity have increased worldwide at an alarming rate in recent decades, affecting people irrespective of age or socioeconomic status [1]
Average Adapted Healthy Eating Index (AHEI) scores evidenced the need to make changes in the diets of the majority of the families, which is in agreement with the results reported by the Chilean Ministry of Health in 2014 [41]
Since the findings of this study show that better diet quality and more frequent family meals seem to be related to higher levels of satisfaction with life and family life in parents, studies on the relationship between food and family should consider diet-related variables, and psychological variables

Summary

Introduction

Overweight and obesity have increased worldwide at an alarming rate in recent decades, affecting people irrespective of age or socioeconomic status [1]. Obesity prevalence seems to have reached a plateau in several high-income countries, it continues to grow in Latin American countries, which are undergoing rapid nutritional transitions [2]. In the specific case of Chile, the prevalence of adult obesity was 23.2% in 2015 [3], whereas 34.3% of adolescents have been reported to be overweight (25.1%) or obese (9.2%) [4]. Several factors are involved in obesity, changes in eating behavior caused by the global nutrition transition have been recognized as major determinants of the obesity epidemic [5]. This transition is characterized by decreased consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables, Int. J. Public Health 2017, 14, 1313; doi:10.3390/ijerph14111313 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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