Intake of added sugar, fruits, vegetables, and legumes of Portuguese preschool children: Baseline data from SmartFeeding4Kids randomized controlled trial participants

Sofia Charneca; Ana Isabel Gomes; Diogo Branco; Tiago Guerreiro; Luísa Barros; Joana Sousa

doi:10.3389/fnut.2023.1150627

Intake of added sugar, fruits, vegetables, and legumes of Portuguese preschool children: Baseline data from SmartFeeding4Kids randomized controlled trial participants

Front Nutr. 2023 Mar 29:10:1150627. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2023.1150627. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Sofia Charneca¹, Ana Isabel Gomes², Diogo Branco³, Tiago Guerreiro³, Luísa Barros², Joana Sousa^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Laboratório de Nutrição, Faculdade de Medicina, Centro Académico de Medicina de Lisboa, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
² Research Center for Psychological Science (CICPSI), Faculdade de Psicologia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
³ LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
⁴ Instituto de Saúde Ambiental (ISAMB), Faculdade de Medicina, Centro Académico de Medicina de Lisboa, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

Abstract

Introduction: The SmartFeeding4Kids (SF4K) program is an online self-guided intervention for parents with the propose of changing parental feeding practices and children's dietary intake, focusing on the intake of added sugars, fruit, vegetables, and legumes. This paper aims to describe children's dietary pattern at baseline through a 24-h food recall, the SmartKidsDiet24.

Methods: Overall, 89 participants recorded at least one meal of the 3-day food recall. Mean age was 36.22 ± 6.05 years and 53.09 ± 15.42 months old for parents and children, respectively. Of these, 22 participants were considered to have 2 days of near complete 24-h food recalls. Children's dietary intake are reported for these 22 participants based on parents reports and, thus, represent estimations only, as it remains unknown whether children consumed other non-reported foods.

Results: Fruit was the group with the highest daily intake among children (mean 1.77 ± 1.10 portions/day), followed by added sugar foods (mean 1.48 ± 0.89 portions/day), vegetables [median 1.27 (1.64) portions/day] and legumes [median 0.12 (0.39) portions/day]. Fruit intake was positively correlated with vegetable intake (p = 0.008). Regarding Dietary Reference Values accomplishment, 13.6% of children exceeded the daily safe and adequate intake of sodium, 77.3% did not meet potassium and fiber recommendations, and 31.8% did not meet vitamin C recommendations.

Discussion: All children did not meet calcium, vitamin B12 and vitamin D intake recommendations. Our findings further justify the need for dietary interventions in this field, to improve young children's diets.

Clinical trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NCT04591496.

Keywords: added sugar; dietary intake; fruits; legumes; preschool children; vegetable.

Associated data

ClinicalTrials.gov/NCT04591496

Grants and funding

This work was received national funding from the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., through the Research Center for Psychological Science of the Faculty of Psychology, University of Lisbon (UIDB/04527/2020 and UIDP/04527/2020) and the Research Project Food Parenting: Study of a new web-based parent intervention (PTDC/PSI-GER/30432/2017). This funding source had no role in the design of this study and will not have any role during its execution, collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data, or decision to submit results for publication.