Document Type
Article
Abstract
Background
Summer vacation is a time when youth gain excessive weight. A key driver of unhealthy weight gain is poor dietary quality. The absence of consistent structure (e.g., school), is hypothesized to be one of the reasons for lower diet quality during summer. This study examined differences in school and summer dietary quality among a diverse cohort of children across three years. We also examined the impact of attending structured programs on children’s diets.
Methods
Parents of 1,032 children (age 5–14 years, 48% girls) completed a time use diary each day for 14-days during school (April/May) and again in summer (July) from 2021 to 2023, for a total of 6 timepoints. The daily diary collected information on the child’s location and dietary intake for that day. Mixed-effects models examined the odds (OR) of consuming a food/beverage (e.g., fruit, vegetable, soda, salty snacks) on a given day during school vs. summer, overall and by income. Models also examined the impact of attending structured programming during summer (e.g., summer day camp) on the likelihood of consumption.
Results
A total of 39,983 time use diaries were completed. Overall, children were less likely to consume fruit, vegetables, milk, 100% juice, and salty snacks (OR range 0.63 to 0.87), and they were more likely to consume non-carbonated sweetened beverages, soda, frozen desserts, and fast food (OR range 1.17 to 1.63) during the summer compared to school. On summer days with structured programming, children were more likely to consume fruits, vegetables, milk, salty snacks, sweetened beverages (OR range 1.13 to 1.45), and they were less likely to consume frozen desserts, fast food, and soda (OR range 0.63 to 0.90). Few differences were observed between income groups.
Conclusions
Children were less likely to report consumption of healthier foods/beverages and more likely to report consumption of unhealthier foods/beverages during summer compared to school. Attending structured programming during summer is associated with improved diet– suggesting such settings have potential to modify dietary intake.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in BMC Public Health, Volume 25, 2025.
Rights
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
APA Citation
Beets, M. W., Burkart, S., Pfledderer, C. D., Adams, E., Weaver, R. G., Armstrong, B., Brazendale, K., Zhu, X., McLain, A., Turner-McGrievy, G., Pate, R., Kaczynski, A., Fairchild, A., Saelens, B., Parker, H., Yaroch, A. L., Eglitis, E., & Holmes, A. J. (2025). Differences in children’s food and beverage consumption between school and summer: Three-year findings from the what’s UP (undermining prevention) with summer observational cohort study. BMC Public Health, 25.https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-025-23446-0