Dietary patterns of Indian school‐aged children and associations with markers of chronic disease risk

There is an increasing burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in India which may be related to changing dietary patterns. We aimed to assess dietary patterns in children since they have time to change unhealthy patterns before NCDs develop. Participants were 665 children, 9–12 years old, born with low birth weight and 77 similarly aged normal birth weight controls. We collected data on sociodemography, anthropometry, body composition, and markers of risk for NCDs: grip strength, long jump, hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). A food frequency questionnaire was used to collect dietary data from which dietary patterns were derived using principal component analysis (PCA). Fourteen food groups were included in the PCA analysis, resulting in three components: ‘fruits and vegetables’, ‘protein’, and ‘sugar and fat’. Higher socioeconomic status and maternal education were associated with lower adherence to the fruit and vegetable pattern and higher adherence to the protein and sugar and fat patterns. Adherence to the fruits and vegetables pattern was associated with lower height‐for‐age, whereas the fat and sugar pattern was associated with higher indicators of body fat. In linear regression analyses adjusted for age, sex, religion, socioeconomic status, maternal education, and season of data collection, adherence to the ‘fruits and vegetables’ pattern was associated with lower grip strength, shorter long jump, and lower HbA1c. Adherence to the other patterns was not associated with NCD risk factors. Higher consumption of fruits and vegetables, achievable even by poorer families in the cohort, may lower HbA1c, a risk factor for diabetes