Original articleFast Food Consumption and Breakfast Skipping: Predictors of Weight Gain from Adolescence to Adulthood in a Nationally Representative Sample
Section snippets
Sample
Data from this study were drawn from Add Health, a longitudinal, nationally representative, school-based study of over 20,000 adolescents in grades 7–12 in the United States. Data were collected and informed consent was obtained under protocols reviewed by the Institutional Review Board of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The current study used data from the weighted in-home samples collected at Wave II (April 1996–August 1996) and Wave III (August 2001–April 2002). Wave II
Demographics
Demographic characteristics of the participants (n = 9919) in the investigation are presented in Table 1. At Wave II, there were 7084 (71.3%) adolescents classified as normal weight and 2835 (28.7%) classified as overweight according to IOTF cut points for age and gender [28]. The participants were predominantly white (66.1%) and had at least one parent with some college education (63.6%). The racial distribution for overweight participants differed significantly from that of normal weight
Discussion
This study, using data from a nationally representative sample, is the first to show increases in fast food consumption and breakfast skipping during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Importantly, greater fast food consumption and breakfast skipping during adolescence and increases in breakfast skipping from adolescence to early adulthood were associated with increased weight gain during this transition. Results indicate that participants consumed fast food about 2 days per week as
Acknowledgment
This research uses data from the Add Health project, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry (PI) and Peter Bearman, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Persons interested in obtaining data files from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population
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