Maternal nutrition literacy and childhood obesity in food-insecure and secure households

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Date
2025
Authors
Hashemzadeh, Maral
Akhlaghi, Masoumeh
Nabizadeh, Kiana
Kazemi, Asma
Miri, Hamid Heidarian
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Nature Research
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10.1038/s41598-025-95044-4
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Abstract
This study examined whether maternal nutrition knowledge could help reduce the risk of obesity in children from food-insecure households compared to those from food-secure households. This cross-sectional study was performed on 327 mothers and their children. The children, aged 6–12 years, were recruited from primary schools throughout Shiraz, Iran. Food-insecurity and nutrition literacy were assessed using the Household Food-insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) and a 60-item Food and Nutrition Literacy Assessment Tool (FNLAT), respectively. Logistic regression models were used to examine the association between children’s overweight/obesity and maternal food and nutritional literacy (FNL) across food-secure households and those facing varying degrees of food-insecurity. One hundred thirty-three participants were classified as mild, 28 as moderate, and 7 as severely food-insecure. The results showed that maternal FNL was significantly associated with a reduced risk of overweight/obesity in children (odds ratio (OR) 0.29, 95% confidence intervals (CI) 0.17–0.51). Only moderate/severe food-insecurity was associated with overweight/obesity (OR 4.64, 95% CI 1.75–12.29). Both in food-secure and food-insecure households, good FNL was associated with a significant reduction in overweight/obesity risk compared to poor FNL. The findings suggest that nutrition education programs may be particularly beneficial for children living in food-insecure households, and that these programs should be tailored to address the specific needs of this population.
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Keywords
Childhood obesity , Cross-sectional study , Food and nutrition literacy , Food-insecurity , Health improvement , Iran , Nutrition knowledge
Citation
Hashemzadeh, M., Akhlaghi, M., Nabizadeh, K., Kazemi, A. and Miri, H. H. (2025) 'Maternal nutrition literacy and childhood obesity in food-insecure and secure households', Scientific Reports, 15(1), p.11656. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-95044-4
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https://hdl.handle.net/10468/17315
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Food and Nutritional Sciences - Journal Articles
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© 2025, the Author(s). Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it.