Background
Understanding determinants of high consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB), a highly prevalent obesogenic behavior, will help build effective customized public health interventions.
Objective
To identify child and parent lifestyle and household demographic factors predictive of high SSB consumption frequency in children from low-income, ethnically diverse communities that may help inform public health interventions.
Design
Cross-sectional telephone household survey.
Participants/Setting
717 boys and 686 girls 3–18 years old from the New Jersey Childhood Obesity Study living in five low-income cities (Camden, New Brunswick, Newark, Trenton, and Vineland). The adult most knowledgeable about household food shopping completed a questionnaire over the telephone inquiring about their and their child’s dietary and physical activity habits, and household-, parent-, and child-level demographics.
Main outcome measures
Child’s SSB consumption frequency.
Statistical analysis performed
Multivariate ordered logit models were designed to investigate a variety of variables hypothesized to affect the frequency of SSB consumption. Exploratory stratified analyses by race, gender, and age were also conducted.
Results
Eight percent of our study participants never consumed SSBs, 45% consumed SSBs at least once per day, and 23% consumed twice or more per day. SSB consumption was higher among children 12–18 vs. 3–5 years (p<0.0001), of non-Hispanic black vs. non-Hispanic white race/ethnicity (p=0.010), who were moderate fast food consumers vs. never consumers (p=0.003), and those whose parents were high vs. low SSB consumers (p<0.0001). Living in a non-English speaking household (p=0.030), having a parent with a college or higher education vs. less than high school (p=0.003), and having breakfast 6–7 days/week vs. never to ≤ twice/week were associated with lower SSB consumption (p=0.001).
Conclusions
We identified a number of household-, parental-, and child-level predictors of SSB consumption, which varied by race, gender and age, useful for building customized interventions targeting certain behaviors in ethnically diverse, low-income children.