How much Italian children follow the Mediterranean diet?

Background The Mediterranean diet (MD) is considered one of the healthiest dietary models, which decrease the risk of chronic diseases and may modulate the organism early response to environmental pollution. In the last decades, Mediterranean countries are replacing the traditional diet with other less healthy eating habits, especially in children and teenagers. As part of the MAPEC_LIFE (Monitoring Air Pollution Effects on Children for supporting public health policy), a project founded by EU Life+ Programme (LIFE12 ENV/IT/000614) which intends to investigate the association between air pollution exposure and early biological effects in children, this study wanted to evaluate children diet style and the level of adherence to MD in over than 1000 children, in relation to their residence, lifestyle, social and family contexts. Methods During the two sampling campaign of the project, a questionnaire was administered to children’s parents. Thediet section contained 116 questions, which investigate consumption frequency of different types of food. Total energy load and diet composition in micro and macro nutrients were calcualted from consumption frequency and the Italian Mediterranean Index (IMI), ranged from 0 to 10, was calculated taking into account the intake of 6 typical Mediterranean and 4 non-Mediterranean foods. On the basis of IMI score, the adherence to MD was classified as low ( 3 IMI score), medium (4-5) and high ( 6). Results Diet analysis was computed on 1162 subjects with two complete questionnaires. The body mass index, calculated for each subjects, showed that the 28.9% of the children were overweighted, with some difference between different residence areas. As regards the adherence to MD, the 59.1% of the children were low adherents to MD. Conclusions The results of this study showed that most of Italian children did not follow MD and that the socio-economic characteristics seemed to not be associated with the diet style.