(P22-039-23) Investigating Adolescent Food Choice Patterns in School: A Study Protocol

Objectives: Adolescent dietary intake in the United Kingdom falls short of guidance, with consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, free sugars, saturated fatty acids exceeding government recommendations, and intake of fibre, fruit, and vegetables below guidance. Adolescents spend a significant part of the day at school and thus, schools are an important area to try to address diet quality. The use of food choice data (automatically collected with some school catering systems) to examine adolescents’ food choice presents a unique opportunity to track adolescent dietary patterns. This is important given that dietary patterns in childhood may track into adulthood. The objective of this study is to explore automatically collected canteen purchase data from a secondary school in England and determine the food choice patterns of adolescents.

Methods: Food choice data will be examined from a secondary school in England, collected over one academic year. The data will be cleaned and prepared before merging with demographic information for the adolescents. The data will comprise of food and drink items on offer in the school canteen such as pizzas, sandwiches, bottled water and juices. All items will be classified into broad and narrow categories based on food type, descriptions, and format. Frequencies of food and beverage selections will be examined, and data will be aggregated at the student level. Food choice patterns will then be determined through cluster analysis. This will give mutually exclusive groups of students with distinct food choice patterns. Statistical relationships between cluster membership and students’ demographic characteristics (age, sex) will be explored.

Results: Ethical approval has been granted by the University of Leeds Faculty Research Ethics Committee (AREA 21-169), and results will relate to the analysis of the food choice data.

Conclusions: Findings from this analysis will help provide further understanding of adolescent food choice in schools. This will add to current evidence and will help inform the design and development of interventions aimed at improving adolescent food choice.

Funding Sources: This research is funded as part of a PhD project at the University of Leeds.