The Relationship Between Nutritional Assessment and Obesity Index

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Obesity has been accepted as the rusk factor of major chronic diseases in our society. And nutritional assessment is the important issue in respect to obesity evaluation. A self-administrated semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire of which validity is recognized is used in nutritional assessment. But the relationship between nutritional assessment resulted from the questionnaire and the obesity index has not been built until now, so we studied about this relationship. METHODS: Among 324 adults who had visited health screening center from June'95 to August '96, 270 adults were evaluated except who had any chronic disease such as diabetes mellitus, pulmonary tuberculosis, thyroid disease by screening data or low calorie diet for aimed weight loss or inadequate Questionnaire. Nutritional intake was assessed by the self-administrated semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire. We evaluated the activity grade, obesity indices such as body mass index(BMI), waist to hip ratio(WHR), percent body fat using bioelectrical impedance fatness analyzer and serum total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, triglyceride. Then we examined the correlation between obesity Indices and nutritional variables each other. We analyzed these results using Pearson's correlation coefficient. RESULTS: We evaluated for a group of 164 men and 106 women whose mean age was 43.9 years, mean BMI was 23.2kg/m2, mean WHR was 0.85 and mean percent body fat was 21.2%. Correlation coefficient between calorie intake to recommended calorie ratio(ICRCR) and BMI was 0.13(P OR =0.05), and percent body fat was 0.07(P> OR =0.05). Fats intake to recommended fats ratio(IFRFR) and obesity indices didn't show the significant correlation between them. We could not find the significant correlation between cholesterol intake and serum total cholesterol, triglyceride but the significant negative correlation between cholesterol intake and serum HDL-cholesterol(r=-0.14) was found. CONCLUSIONS: Only BMI among obesity indices and ICRCR showed low(r=0.13) correlation coefficient although it is significant. Our results shows that obesity is the complex syndrome influenced by genetic, social, psychological, medical variables besides nutritional impacts.