School-Aged Children in Vancouver, Canada Do Not Meet Dietary Choline Recommendations but Meet Recommendations for Folate and Vitamin B12
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nutrients such as choline, betaine, folate, and vitamin B12 are required for proper growth and development, but little is known about these nutrients in children. Our objective was to determine intakes and biomarkers of these nutrients in school-aged children (5 to 6 years old). A cross-sectional study of healthy children (n = 285) recruited from Vancouver, Canada were assessed. Dietary information was collected using three 24-hour recalls. Nutrient intakes were estimated using the Canadian Nutrient File and USDA database for choline; supplement use was collected by questionnaire. Plasma biomarkers were quantified by mass spectrometry and immunoassay. Daily dietary intakes were (mean ± SD) choline 250 ± 96 mg, betaine 88 ± 41 mg, folate 335 ± 126 µg DFE, and vitamin B12 3.78 ± 2.71 µg. Top food sources were dairy and eggs (42–57%) for choline and vitamin B12, and cereal and grains (41–60%) for betaine and folate. Only 40% of children met the choline adequate intake (AI) recommendation for North America (≥250 mg/d); 81.5% met the European AI (≥170 mg/d). Plasma free choline, betaine, and dimethylglycine concentrations were (mean ± SD) 8.62 ± 2.13 µmol/L, 45.3 ± 13.7 µmol/L, 3.34 ± 1.03 µmol/L, respectively. Dietary choline intake and plasma free choline were not related. However, dietary choline intake was positively associated with plasma dimethylglycine. Less than 5% of children had inadequate folate and vitamin B12 intakes. More than half of the children (59.4%) were consuming a supplement containing B-vitamins, but none included choline or betaine. Some children (5.26%) had total folic acid intakes above the North American upper limit (UL; >400 µg/d); 10.90% had intakes above the European UL (>300 µg/d). Vitamin B12 intake was positively associated with plasma total vitamin B12 (mean ± SD; 594 ± 158 pmol/L) in an adjusted model (sex, age, total energy intake, and supplement use; p < 0.05). Our findings suggest that many school-aged children are not meeting dietary choline recommendations. Some children may have excessive folic acid intakes. The impact of imbalanced methyl nutrient intakes during this active period of growth and development needs to be determined in the future. CIHR, NSERC, and BC Children's Hospital Research Institute.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".