Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915
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Item Household food insecurity, nutrient intakes and BMI in New Zealand infants(Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Nutrition Society, 2025-11-03) Katiforis I; Smith C; Haszard JJ; Styles SE; Leong C; Fleming EA; Taylor RW; Conlon CA; Beck KL; Von Hurst PR; Te Morenga LA; Daniels L; Rowan M; Casale M; McLean NH; Cox AM; Jones EA; Brown KJ; Bruckner BR; Jupiterwala R; Wei A; Heath A-LMObjective: The first year of life is a critical period when nutrient intakes can affect long-term health outcomes. Although household food insecurity may result in inadequate nutrient intakes or a higher risk of obesity, no studies have comprehensively assessed nutrient intakes of infants from food insecure households. This study aimed to investigate how infant nutrient intakes and body mass index (BMI) differ by household food security. Design: Cross-sectional analysis of the First Foods New Zealand study of infants aged 7–10 months. Two 24-hour diet recalls assessed nutrient intakes. “Usual” intakes were calculated using the Multiple Source Method. BMI z-scores were calculated using World Health Organization Child Growth Standards. Setting: Dunedin and Auckland, New Zealand. Participants: Households with infants (n=604) classified as: severely food insecure, moderately food insecure, or food secure. Results: Nutrient intakes of food insecure and food secure infants were similar, aside from slightly higher free and added sugars intakes in food insecure infants. Energy intakes were adequate, and intakes of most nutrients investigated were likely to be adequate. Severely food insecure infants had a higher mean BMI z-score than food secure infants, although no significant differences in weight categories (underweight; healthy weight; overweight) were observed between groups. Conclusions: Household food insecurity, in the short term, does not appear to adversely impact the nutrient intakes and weight status of infants. However, mothers may be protecting their infants from potential nutritional impacts of food insecurity. Future research should investigate how food insecurity affects nutrient intakes of the entire household.Item A reproduction of the results of Onyike et al. (2003)(2021) Brown NJL; van Rongen J; van der Velde J; Williams M; Schönbrodt, FDOnyike et al. (2003) analyzed data from a large-scale US-American data set, the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES-III), and reported an association between obesity and major depression, especially among people with severe obesity. Here, we report the results of a detailed replication of Onyike et al.’s analyses. While we were able to reproduce the majority of these authors’ descriptive statistics, this took a substantial amount of time and effort, and we found several minor errors in the univariate descriptive statistics reported in their Tables 1 and 2. We were able to reproduce most of Onyike et al.’s bivariate findings regarding the relationship between obesity and depression (Tables 3 and 4), albeit with some small discrepancies (e.g., with respect to the magnitudes of standard errors). On the other hand, we were unable to reproduce Table 5, containing Onyike et al.’s findings with respect to the relationship between obesity and depression when controlling for plausible confounding variables—arguably the paper’s most important results—because some of the included predictor variables appear to be either unavailable, or not coded in the way reported by Onyike et al., in the public NHANES-III data sets. We discuss the implications of our findings for the transparency of reporting and the reproducibility of published results.
