Less than 30% of Australian children are eating appropriate quality carbs

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-07-10 04:00

Australia; NSW; QLD

Raphael Nogueira

Half of all Australian adults and less than a third of children are meeting Australian carbohydrate quality standards in their diet, according to an Australian study. Researchers surveyed about 9000 adults and about 3000 children and assessed their diets to see if they were adhering to three ratios used to measure quality of carbohydrate intake; simple, modified and dual. The simple ratio is consuming at least 1g of dietary fibre per 10g of carbohydrates, with modified and dual ratios taking sugar intake into account. 50.2 per cent of adults and 28.6 per cent of children adhered to the simple ratio, with lower adherence for the other two ratios. The researchers say the study showed following these ratios was associated with a more nutrient-rich and higher quality diet.

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Journal/
conference: PLOS ONE

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Bond University, Nutrition Research Australia, Sydney

Funder: This project has been funded by Nestle´ Research. The funder contributed to the initial study concept and provided support in the form of salaries for authors (MB, AM, MW, SM, TC and FFM) and direct research costs (e.g., software, overheads), but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of the authors affiliated with the funder (VC, KAL, KC) are articulated in the author contributions’ section.

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