Original articleFamily Meals and Substance Use: Is There a Long-Term Protective Association?
Section snippets
Methods
The sample included 366 male adolescents (45.4%) and 440 female adolescents (54.6%) who were surveyed at two time points 5 years apart (mean age at follow-up, 17.2 years; range, 15–18 years). Data come from Project EAT-II, a longitudinal study of eating patterns and related socioenvironmental, personal, and behavioral factors among adolescents. In Project EAT-I, 1608 middle-school students (grades 7 and 8) at public schools in the metropolitan area of the Twin Cities, Minnesota, completed
Results
Approximately 60% of the sample (59.5% of males and 61.2% of female adolescents) reported five or more family meals per week at the baseline assessment. As shown in Table 1, a minority of participants reported at least monthly use of each substance at follow-up, ranging from 11.7% of females reporting marijuana use to 25.5% of females reporting cigarette smoking.
Family meal frequency at baseline was significantly associated with cigarette smoking, alcohol and marijuana use at follow-up for
Discussion
Results from this study suggest that regular family meals in adolescence may have a long-term protective association with the development of substance use over 5 years among female adolescents. Middle-school female adolescents reporting at least five family meals per week were significantly less likely to report regular use of cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana during their high school years than their counterparts whose families did not have regular meals, even after accounting for earlier
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by Grant No. R40 MC 00319-02 (to D.N.-S.) from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (Title V, Social Security Act), Health Resources and Service Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and from the General Mills Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition.
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