Abstract
Background
Although imbalances in dietary intakes can have short and longer term influences on the health of preschool children, few tools exist to quickly and easily identify nutritional risk in otherwise healthy young children.
Objectives
To develop and test the validity of a parent-administered questionnaire (NutricheQ) as a means of evaluating dietary risk in young children (12–36 months).
Design
Following a comprehensive development process and internal reliability assessment, the NutricheQ questionnaire was validated in a cohort of 371 Irish preschool children as part of the National Preschool Nutrition Survey. Dietary risk was rated on a scale ranging from 0 to 22 from 11 questions, with a higher score indicating higher risk.
Results
Children with higher NutricheQ scores had significantly (p<0.05) lower mean daily intakes of key nutrients such as iron, zinc, vitamin D, riboflavin, niacin, folate, phosphorous, potassium, carotene, retinol, and dietary fibre. They also had lower (p<0.05) intakes of vegetables, fish and fish dishes, meat and infant/toddler milks and higher intakes of processed foods and non-milk beverages, confectionery, sugars and savoury snack foods indicative of poorer dietary quality. Areas under the curve values of 84.7 and 75.6% were achieved for ‘medium’ and ‘high’ dietary risk when compared with expert risk ratings indicating good consistency between the two methods.
Conclusion
NutricheQ is a valid method of quickly assessing dietary quality in preschoolers and in identifying those at increased nutritional risk.
To access the supplementary material to this article, please see Supplementary files under ‘Article Tools’.
To access the supplementary material to this article, please see Supplementary files under ‘Article Tools’.
Conflict of interest and funding
The National Preschool Nutrition Survey was funded by the Irish Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the Health Research Board under the Food for Health Research Ireland initiative (2007–2012). The current analysis was funded by Danone Baby Nutrition. The funders were not involved in the design, analysis, or writing of this manuscript. The development of NutricheQ was coordinated by NR on behalf of Danone Baby Nutrition, who provided funding.
Notes
To access the supplementary material to this article, please see Supplementary files under ‘Article Tools’.