Parental health literacy & nutrition literacy in relation to feeding practices

Parental feeding practices (PFP) are specific behaviours or strategies that parents use to influence what, when and how much their children eat. There is evidence that PFP can affect children’s eating behaviour and diet quality(1) . Greek children seem to have poor diet quality and high rates of obesity. Recent evidence suggests that health literacy (HL) seems to be a stronger predictor of health than age, income, employment, education, and race(2) and is directly link to premature death(3) . Moreover nutrition literacy (NL) seems to be positively correlated with a healthy and balance diet(4) . Poor HL and NL are associated with negative health outcomes and they comprise an emerging field for health policy, practice and research. The aim of the study was to investigate the relation between certain PFP and HL and NL levels in Greek parents. This is a cross-sectional study that took place in the urban area of the Attica region, in Greece. The sample consisted of 402 parents (68.4% mothers). The recruitment of participants was done in a feasibility base and the participation rate was 85,4%. Parents completed the Greek version of Comprehensive Parental Feeding Questionnaire. HL and NL were assessed via the European Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLS_EU_Q47) and the Greek version of the Nutrition Literacy Scale (NLS-Gr), respectively. Sociodemographic characteristics were also assessed. For the statistical analysis non parametric tests Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis were used