Socioeconomic inequalities in children’s diet: the role of the home food environment

Table 4 Associations of individual components of a healthy food environment with healthy and unhealthy eating

	Estimated association with composite Healthy Eating Index		Estimated association with healthy foods		Estimated association with unhealthy foods
	Beta (95% CI)	p-value	Beta (95% CI)	p-value	Beta (95% CI)	p-value
Regular family meals (REF: No)	0.13 (-0. 82, 1.07)	0.7944	-0.08 (-0.66, 0.51)	0.8008	0.05 (-0.37, 0.46)	0.8299
TV is not on during dinner (REF: TV is on)	0.8 (0.24, 1.36)	0.0052	0.26 (-0.09, 0.61)	0.1429	-0.27 (-0.51, -.02)	0.0349
Child did not eat at a restaurant on the previous day (REF: Had at least one restaurant meal)	1.46 (0.73, 2.2)	<.0001	-1.18 (-1.64, -0.73)	<.0001	-2.11 (-2.44, -1.79)	<.0001
Availability of healthy foods at the family dinner table (range: 0-4)	0.76 (0.54, 0.98)	<.0001	0.38 (0.24, 0.51)	<.0001	-0.15 (-0.25, -0.06)	0.0019
Restriction of unhealthy foods at the family dinner table (range: 0-2)	0.35 (-0.01, 0.71)	0.0590	-0.06 (-0. 29, 0.16)	0.5786	-0.25 (-0.41, -0.09)	0.0021
Difference between lowest and highest educational category, before adjusting for home food environment	-1.1 (-2.04, -0.15)	0.0227	0.17 (-0.42, 0.76)	0.5693	0.88 (0.46, 1.31)	<.0001
Difference between lowest and highest educational category, after adjusting for home food environment	-1.04 (-2.01, -0.07)	0.0356	0.17 (-0.44, 0.77)	0.5895	0.84 (0.41, 1.27)	0.0001

NOTES: SPAN Healthy Eating Index (SHEI) is a composite measure combining responses to consumption of healthy foods and unhealthy foods, scaled to 100, and coded so that higher scores represent healthier diets. See Table 1 for a listing of the healthy and unhealthy foods comprising the SHEI. This table examines the composite SHEI, as well as the healthy foods and unhealthy foods components separately.

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