Food sources of energy and nutrients in the diets of infants and toddlers in urban areas of China, based on one 24-hour dietary recall

Background: Food sources of nutrients in young children in China have been little investigated. The objective of this study was to understand feeding patterns of young children through an analysis of food sources of energy and nutrients in the diets of infants and toddlers living in urban areas in China. Methods: This study was part of the cross-sectional study, Maternal Infant Nutrition Growth (MING). One 24-h dietary recall was completed for a total of 1409 children (infants 6–11 months, younger toddlers 12–23 months, and older toddlers 24–36 months) via face-to-face interviews with the primary caregivers. All food, beverage and dietary supplements that the child consumed on the previous day were recorded and processed with a database including data from Chinese Food Composition tables. All reported foods and supplements were assigned to one of 83 food groups developed for the study. Percent contribution of each food group to nutrient intakes was calculated. Results: Children in all 3 age groups received a majority of energy (52 to 69 %) from few foods including infant formula or growing-up (fortified) milk, rice, noodles, pork and eggs, with rice becoming the number one source of energy by 24 months. Rice and noodles were not only top sources of energy (17 to 26 %) and carbohydrate (27 to 40 %) but also top sources of protein (13 to 16 %), iron (13 to 18 %) and zinc (11 to 18 %). Supplements made substantial contributions to intakes of vitamin A, zinc, iron and calcium. Salt added during home-cooking was the main source of sodium (60 to 80 %). Conclusions: Few foods made up the core of the diets of infants and young toddlers living in urban areas in China. Low nutrient-dense rice and noodles were top sources of many nutrients, which could potentially lead to inadequate intakes of some key nutrients. Background Early childhood is a time when food preferences and dietary habits are being established. The dietary patterns established during this time often persist into adulthood and have implications for developing diet-related chronic diseases later [1], such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes [2]. Knowledge about the sources of energy and nutrients in young children’s diets can help health professionals to gain a more complete understanding about their diets and the specific strategies for improvement. Food sources of energy and nutrients in young children have been studied in the US [3–6]. With a focus on the US infant and toddler population, the Feeding Infants and Toddlers Study (FITS) recently reported the sources of energy and 24 nutrients in detail and described shifts in major nutrient sources as children age [6]. Dietary sources of nutrients have also been studied in pre-school children in Belgium and Sweden [7, 8]. By comparison, such studies in China are very limited. To date, few published studies available in China only described the intake of one nutrient such as energy or fats or iron with limited information for food sources [9–11]. The current paper describes the major food sources of energy and nutrients among infants and toddlers in China * Correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected] Nestlé Research Centre, Lausanne, Switzerland School of Public Health, Peking University, Beijing, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © 2015 Wang et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Wang et al. BMC Nutrition (2015) 1:19 DOI 10.1186/s40795-015-0014-x