Factors associated with nutritional status of 7-10 year-old schoolchildren: sociodemographic variables, dietary and parental nutritional status.

OBJECTIVE To estimate the prevalence of overweight / obesity in schoolchildren, and to investigate its association with parents' nutritional status, socioeconomic factors and food consumption. METHODS Cross-sectional study with 1,223 schoolchildren, 7 to 10 years old from Florianópolis, SC. We collected anthropometric measures directly and dietary intake of previous day; parents' data were collected from a socioeconomic and self-reported anthropometric questionnaire. Schoolchildren's nutritional status was defined using the Body Mass Index (BMI) for age and sex according to the reference data of the World Health Organization (2007), and parents' nutritional status was defined according to the World Health Organization BMI cutoff points (1995). We performed bivariate and multivariate analysis using Poisson regression. RESULTS Prevalence of overweight/obesity was 36.2% in boys and 32.7% among girls. The prevalence was 56.3% and 27.5% in fathers and mothers, respectively. In the final model, mother's (p = 0.001) and father's nutritional status (p = 0.050) remained directly associated with schoolchildren's overweight/obesity. The prevalence of overweight/obesity was 1.58 times higher in schoolchildren with overweight/obese mothers, and 1.41 times higher in schoolchildren with overweight/obese fathers, compared to mothers and fathers without the condition. CONCLUSION There was a high prevalence of overweight/obesity among schoolchildren, which was associated with the nutritional status of mothers and fathers. These results confirm the need to prevent overweight/obesity in schoolchildren with actions that also involve the family environment in order to reduce obesity in this population.