Pediatric Obesity and Nutrition Counseling

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

About one third of children are overweight/obese. This study examined whether these children were more likely to have nutrition counseling documented and if counseling was affected by gender or ethnicity. Method. A retrospective secondary data analysis was used to explore nutrition counseling for an insured pediatric population. A sample of 526 records met inclusion criteria. Member records were categorized based on BMI as underweight, normal weight, or overweight/obese. Results. The observed proportion of overweight/obese children was significantly higher than the national average, 37% versus 33% respectively, P = .03. No significant difference was found in documented nutrition counseling for children with overweight/obese BMIs—Pearson χ2(1, N = 526) = 1.586; P = .21, Φ = 0.06. Likewise, no significant difference was found in documented nutrition counseling for overweight/obese children by race—Pearson χ2(1, N = 37) = 0.11; P = .74, Φ = 0.05—or gender—Pearson χ2(1, N = 194) = 0.35; P = .55; Φ = −0.04. In this sample, African American children were almost twice as likely to have Medicaid compared with commercial benefits—Pearson χ2(1, N = 114) = 13.57; P < .001; Φ = −0.35. However, no significant difference was found in documented nutrition counseling between insurance benefits—Pearson χ2(1, N = 194) = 0.04; P = .85; Φ = 0.01.