The consumption of ultra-processed and high fat content products from parents and its effect on childhood obesity prevalence

Childhood obesity consists one of the most significant problems of public health in 21st century as in the last 30 years the number of overweight/obese children has increased dramatically. The increasing intake of processed and rich in saturated fat foods has mainly contributed to the expansion of this situation. Parents’ nutritional behavior, as role models, regarding the consumption of processed products has not been adequately investigated. Therefore, this review paper aimed to examine the association between parents’ child eating habits and particularly on the consumption of high-fat food and processed products. Literature search was conducted in databases of PubMed and Scopus, from 1970 to 2019, in order to reveal epidemiologic studies, using as keywords: “children obesity, parents, high-fat processed food, food supply, role modeling”. According to the provided data, it was observed that parents have a pivotal role on children’s nutritional behavior and the most important was that trends towards the consumption of processed foods have been increased alarmingly. An urgent need, therefore, is to implement an intervention to reverse this phenomenon, mainly focused on the family’s nutritional quality. Hellenic J Nutr Diet 2018, 5(2):81-91