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.