Mother's nutrition knowledge and children's dietary intakes

This article uses U.S. food consumption data to examine the effect of mater nal nutrition knowledge on the dietary intakes of children between two and seventeen years of age. Results show that maternal knowledge influences chi ldren's diets and that such influence decreases as children grow older. Nut rition knowledge acts as a pathway through which maternal education influen ces children's diets. This finding supports the hypothesis that education a ffects health-related choices by raising the allocative efficiency of healt h input use. The results suggest that nutrition education may be more effec tive if targeted both toward mothers with young children and directly towar d school-age children.