Children's Eating Behaviour Traits and Dental Caries

Objectives: This cross-sectional study aimed to assess eating behavior traits in children with or without dental caries.

Methods: A sample of 580 children aged 8 years enrolled in 20 public schools in the city of Pelotas, Brazil were included. Parents/caregivers provided sociodemographic information and answered the Children's Eating Behavior Questionnaire (CEBQ) to assess eating behavior traits. This instrument possesses the subscales: food responsiveness, enjoyment of food, satiety responsiveness, slowness in eating, food fussiness, emotional overeating, emotional undereating, and desire to drink. To assess the presence of decayed, missing or filled teeth (DMFT/dmft), the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria were adopted. WHO criteria were used to evaluate presence of overweight and obesity. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare the mean score in each CEBQ subscale according to the different exposure variables. Linear regression was used to assess the association between dental caries and CEBQ subscales means.

Results: Approximately half of the children were male (51.03 percent) and 66.73 percent had low/middle socioeconomic status. The mean DMFT/dmft was 2.41, ranging from 0 to 13, and 63 percent of the children showed DMFT/dmft > 0. After adjustments for potential confounders, children with dental caries showed higher scores on the subscales desire to drink (P = 0.03), and satiety responsiveness (P = 0.04).

Conclusion: The present study showed that some aspects of eating behaviors differ in children with or without caries. Such knowledge adds to the understanding of the multifactorial etiology of caries and may help in the development of nutritional interventions to promote healthy eating behaviors, with benefits for oral health.