Examining diet quality using the Healthy Eating Index among children of 3 to 6 years old in Mashhad

One of the most important factors in maintaining and improving children's health is the quality of diet. Given the importance of this issue and that so far the quality of children's diets has not been studied in Mashhad, this study was conducted to assess the quality of children's diets in Mashhad using the Healthy Eating Index (HEI).
The diet of 723 children of 3 to 6 years old was collected by food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). FFQ information was evaluated with Nutritionist 4 software and the quality of children's diets was analyzed by HEI. SPSS software was used for statistical analysis, to examine the normality of data, and for comparison between parts of HEI on three levels, respectively, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Chi-square test were used.
Overall90.6% of children did not have good quality of diet. However, 75.5% percent of children were receiving recommended amounts of bread and cereals. This diat for food groups of dairy, vegetables, fruits, and meat, was respectively, 73.6, 72.9, 73.7 and 87.6 percent, and 88.3 percent of children were consuming too much fat. This diet was, respectively, 69.9 and 71.8 percent for saturated fat and cholesterol. Only 19.4% of children had good food variety.
Most children's diet quality was less than desirable. Low quality diet of children in the population studied was due to the high consumption of fat, saturated fat and cholesterol, and low variability of diet. Thus, probably, by focusing on these issues, one can improve the quality of children's diets.