Dinner consumption and cardiovascular disease risk factors among a nationally representative sample of Iranian adolescents: the CASPIAN-III Study

Introduction: This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the association between cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and dinner consumption in a nationally representative sample of Iranian adolescents.
Methods: The present study was conducted on 5642 adolescents aged 10-18 years old in 27 provinces in Iran. The subjects were included applying by multistage random cluster sampling. Participants who ate ≥5 dinners during a week were considered as a dinner consumer.
Results: Among 5642 subjects, 1412 (25%) did not consume dinner. Dinner consumers were less likely to be overweight or obese (P < 0.001) and abdominally obese (P < 0.001) as well as to have an abnormal level of HDL-C (P = 0.02). Dinner skipper youths had a higher risk for overweight or obesity (odds ratio [OR]: 1.62; 95% CI: 1.39-1.89) and abdominal obesity (OR: 1.59; 95% CI: 1.36-1.85) which remained significant after adjusting confounding factors (P <0001). No relationship was observed between dinner consumption and the rest of the CVD risk factors, neither in crude nor in adjusted models. A higher proportion of dinner-consumer adolescents had no CVD risk factors in comparison to dinner-skipper subjects (31.1% vs. 28%).
Conclusion: Eating dinner might be inversely associated with some CVD risk factors among Iranian adolescents. Further prospective studies will need to prove this theory.