Impact of educational attainment on the quality of young women's diets

Abstract

Objective: New findings, that relate poor foetal growth to long-term outcomes, highlight the need to understand more about the nature of women's diets before and during pregnancy. This study examines the influence of sociodemographic and anthropometric factors on the quality of the diets of young women in the UK. Design: Diet was assessed by an interviewer-administered food frequency questionnaire. A single diet score was calculated for each woman using the first component defined by principal components analysis. Setting: Southampton, UK. Subjects: A total of 6125 non pregnant women aged 20-34 y. Results: The diets of women with low diet scores were characterised by low intakes of fruit and vegetables, wholemeal bread, rice and pasta, yogurt, and breakfast cereals, but high intakes of chips and roast potatoes, sugar, white bread, red, and processed meat and full-fat dairy products. Educational attainment was the most important factor related to the diet score. In all, 55% (95% CI 50-59%) of women with no educational qualifications had scores in the lowest quarter of the distribution, compared with only 3% (95% CI 2-4%) of those who had a degree. Smoking, watching television, lack of strenuous exercise, and living with children were also associated with lower diet scores. After taking these factors into account, no other factor including social class, the deprivation score of the neighbourhood, or receipt of benefits added more than 1% to the variance in the diet score. Conclusions: Poor achievement at school defines a substantial group of women in the UK who may be vulnerable. Many of these women have poor diets that are not simply a result of the level of deprivation in their neighbourhood, or of living at a level of poverty that entitles them to benefits. We suggest that it is a priority to identify and to address the barriers that prevent these women from improving the quality of their diets.

Stability of dietary patterns in young women over a 2-year period

“…Of the socio-demographic factors that we considered, only frequency of strenuous exercise at initial interview was related to the change; greater increases in scores were seen in women who took more frequent exercise. Previous work in the whole cohort has shown, in crosssectional analyses, a relationship between frequent strenuous exercise and higher prudent diet scores (Robinson et al, 2004). The present study shows that strenuous exercise is also predictive of a continued increase in prudent diet score over 2 years.…”

“…(Stata Corporation, 2001). The 100 items of the FFQ were combined to create 49 broader groups according to nutrient composition and comparable usage (Robinson et al, 2004) before the principal components analysis (PCA) was performed (Joliffe and Morgan, 1992). This statistical technique produces components that are independent linear combinations of the dietary variables with maximum variance.…”

“…The women who took part in the repeat study are a subgroup from the Southampton Women's Survey, a study of a general population sample of women aged 20-34 years (Robinson et al, 2004;Inskip et al, 2006). Although the repeat subgroup is small, 78% of those contacted agreed to take part, they were representative of the whole cohort and included a wide range of socio-demographic backgrounds and lifestyles .…”

“…A limitation of the study is the small size of the subgroup: combined with the wide range of answers to the open-ended question about what had changed in the diet we were unable to fully explore the nature of change in diet. We assessed diet using a food frequency questionnaire that includes all the foods commonly eaten in the UK, and which was administered by trained research nurses (Robinson et al, 2004). Although there is concern that food frequency questionnaires may be subject to bias (Byers, 2001), they have been shown to identify similar patterns of diet as weighed diet records (Hu et al, 1999;Khani et al, 2004).…”

“…Recruitment details for the SWS have been published elsewhere (Robinson et al, 2004;Inskip et al, 2006). All women were visited at home to obtain information on diet and lifestyle, and anthropometric measurements of body composition were taken.…”