Zaragoza, Wednesday, January 22, 2025. The greater the adherence to the Mediterranean diet of preschool students, the healthier their cardiometabolic profile. This is one of the conclusions obtained with the MED4CHILD questionnaire, a new tool to identify dietary patterns and their relationship with health in early stages of life. This project has been designed and developed by a team of researchers from the University of Zaragoza, the Aragón Health Research Institute (IIS Aragón), the Human Nutrition Unit of the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) and the Pere Virgili Health Research Institute (IISPV) and 5 other centers in Spain that are part of the CIBERobn Network of the Carlos III Health Institute.
“The MED4CHILD questionnaire is a simple, quick and inexpensive tool that will make it possible to evaluate and promote the Mediterranean diet in preschool children, so its use will have important health benefits for this population,” the researchers emphasize.
The study, recently published in the prestigious European Journal of Pediatrics, was carried out on a sample of 858 children from the CORALS and MELIPOP cohorts. The results show that children with higher scores on this questionnaire consumed more foods characteristic of the Mediterranean diet, such as fruits, vegetables, fish and nuts, and had a healthier cardiometabolic profile, including lower waist circumference and lower levels of triglycerides and insulin in the blood.
This new assessment differs from previous tools by including recommended portions adapted to the child population, offering a more accurate assessment of adherence to the Mediterranean diet following the new lifestyles and rhythms of today’s society. This advance has the potential to optimize the monitoring of dietary habits in childhood and contribute to improve public health interventions aimed at preventing diet-related diseases.
The questionnaire is available for use in clinical and research settings, and is expected to serve as a basis for future studies regarding the Mediterranean diet and its relationship to the development or management of nutrition- and metabolism-related diseases in childhood.
The project has been co-led by Alicia Larruy-García, Dr. Pilar De Miguel-Etayo and Professor Luis Moreno, belonging to the GENUD group of the University of Zaragoza and IIS Aragón, together with Dr. Nancy Babio and Professor Jordi Salas-Salvadó of the University Rovira i Virgili and the Institut d’Investigació Sanitària Pere Virgili, all CIBERobn researchers.
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