Using food network analysis to understand meal patterns in pregnant women with high and low diet quality.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Little is known about how meal-specific food intake contributes to overall diet quality during pregnancy, which is related to numerous maternal and child health outcomes. Food networks are probabilistic graphs using partial correlations to identify relationships among food groups in dietary intake data, and can be analyzed at the meal level. This study investigated food networks across meals in pregnant women and explored differences by overall diet quality classification.

Methods

Women were asked to complete three 24-h dietary recalls throughout pregnancy (n = 365) within a prospective cohort study in the US. Pregnancy diet quality was evaluated using the Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI, range 0-100), calculated across pregnancy. Networks from 40 food groups were

SUBMITTER: Schwedhelm C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8306349 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature