Leila Azadbakht
1,2,3, Fahime Akbari
4,3, Mostafa Qorbani
5,6, Mohammad Esmaeil Motlagh
7, Gelayol Ardalan
8, Ramin Heshmat
9, Elnaz Daneshzad
1, Roya Kelishadi
8*1 Department of Community Nutrition, School of Nutritional Sciences and Dietetics, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
2 Diabetes Research Center, Endocrinology and Metabolism Clinical Sciences Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
3 Department of Community Nutrition, School of Nutrition and Food Science, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran
4 Food Security Research Center, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran
5 Department of Public Health, Alborz University of Medical Sciences, Karaj, Iran
6 Department of Epidemiology, Non-Communicable Diseases Research Center, Endocrinology, and Metabolism Population Sciences Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
7 Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran
8 Department of Pediatrics, Child Growth and Development Research Center, Research Institute for Primordial Prevention of Non-Communicable Disease, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran
9 Epidemiology Department, Chronic Diseases Research Center, Endocrinology& Metabolism Research Institute, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Introduction: This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the association between cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and dinner consumption in a nationally representative sample of Iranian adolescents.
Methods: The present study was conducted on 5642 adolescents aged 10-18 years old in 27 provinces in Iran. The subjects were included applying by multistage random cluster sampling. Participants who ate ≥5 dinners during a week were considered as a dinner consumer.
Results: Among 5642 subjects, 1412 (25%) did not consume dinner. Dinner consumers were less likely to be overweight or obese (P < 0.001) and abdominally obese (P < 0.001) as well as to have an abnormal level of HDL-C (P = 0.02). Dinner skipper youths had a higher risk for overweight or obesity (odds ratio [OR]: 1.62; 95% CI: 1.39-1.89) and abdominal obesity (OR: 1.59; 95% CI: 1.36-1.85) which remained significant after adjusting confounding factors (P <0001). No relationship was observed between dinner consumption and the rest of the CVD risk factors, neither in crude nor in adjusted models. A higher proportion of dinner-consumer adolescents had no CVD risk factors in comparison to dinner-skipper subjects (31.1% vs. 28%).
Conclusion: Eating dinner might be inversely associated with some CVD risk factors among Iranian adolescents. Further prospective studies will need to prove this theory.