Assessing Diet Quality in a Racially and Ethnically Diverse Cohort of Low-income Toddlers.

Background: Low-income racially and ethnically diverse children are at higher risk for obesity compared with their counterparts; yet, few studies have assessed their diet quality.
Objective: The aim of the study was to evaluate the diet quality of a racially and ethnically diverse cohort of 2-year-olds using the Healthy Eating Index (HEI)-2010.
Methods: We used 24-hour dietary recall data from caregivers of toddlers (24-34 months) at 4 pediatric resident clinics that participated in the Greenlight Study to calculate compliance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) using total HEI score (range 0-100) and 12 component scores.
Results: Participants (n = 231) were mostly Hispanic (57%) or non-Hispanic black (27%) and from low-income families. Mean HEI-2010 score was 62.8 (standard deviation [SD] 10.5). Though not significant, Hispanics had the highest HEI score. Toddlers of caregivers without obesity, older than 35 years and born outside the United States had higher HEI scores. Most had high HEI component scores for dairy, fruit, and protein foods, but few achieved maximum scores, particularly for whole grains (13%), vegetables (10%), and fatty acid ratio (7%).
Conclusions: Despite scores reflective of DGA recommendations for fruit, dairy and protein foods, toddlers in this diverse sample had low quality diets as measured by the HEI, driven largely by low component scores for whole grains, vegetables, and ratio of unsaturated to saturated fatty acids.