BMI Status and Trends among Native American Family Members Participating in the Growing Resilience Home Garden Study

Abstract

This research reports the BMI status of 176 adults and 134 children from 96 Native American families who are participating in a randomized controlled trial to assess health impacts of home gardens. Analyses include demographic associations with BMI using a novel approach of analyzing BMI status of children and adults together as one population by using LMS-based z scores generated from NHANES data. Results fit national data, with Native Americans more likely to be overweight/obese than other US demographic groups. This, in turn, makes Indigenous communities more vulnerable to chronic diseases. Ending these health inequities requires substantial public health nutrition investments in, for example, restoration of Indigenous foodways. This trial is registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT02672748.

Keywords: BMI; Wind River Indian Reservation; statistical methods; food and nutrition of Indigenous peoples; research report.

FIGURE 1

BMI z-score across age. BMI z scores increase with participant age until people are in their late 30s. Then, gender trajectories diverge, with females slightly dropping while men continue to increase. These relations are statistically significant (P < 0.01), with the exception of the male trend (P < 0.1). When re-analyzed separately by gender and by adult/child status, this pattern is already apparent among girls, who increasingly exceed the BMI of their age peers in the US reference population as they reach adulthood ages (P < 0.05). BMIZ, BMI z score.