Understanding Australian adults' eating patterns: relationships of frequency and/or timing of eating occasions, including meals and snacks, with dietary intakes, obesity and blood pressure

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Little is known about dietary intake at the level of an “eating occasion (EO)”, which includes meals and snacks. Current dietary advice is framed around the amount and types of food populations should consume, rather than a consideration of eating patterns. Eating patterns describe the frequency and temporal distribution of meals and snacks. Eating patterns are likely to be important determinants of adults’ dietary intakes and health; however, the nutritional and health impacts of EO, meal and snack frequency and temporal eating patterns are inconclusive. Further, inconsistent evidence for eating patterns and health may be partly attributed to the lack of consensus on approaches for defining an EO or for assessing temporal eating patterns. The aims of these secondary analyses were to: 1) explore the influence of different definitions of EOs on the characterisation of eating patterns, 2) to examine temporal eating patterns using a novel data-driven analytic approach, and 3) to investigate associations of different eating patterns (e.g. frequency of all EOs, meals and snacks; temporal eating patterns) with nutrient intakes, overall diet quality and measures of adiposity and blood pressure. The Census and Statistics Act 1905 provides ethics approval for the Australian Bureau of Statistics to conduct household interview components of national surveys, including the National Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey (NNPAS). At this is a secondary analysis of the NNPAS data which is de-identified, an exemption for ethics approval was granted by the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee on April 16, 2015. (Project number: 2015-073).