Dietary Behavior, Nutritional Status and Their Determinants among the 5th and 6th Grade Students in Taipei, Taiwan

• Main Authors: Chi-Min Chang, 張琪敏
• Other Authors: Shu Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/mz5e27

碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 臨床暨社區護理研究所 === 97 === Childhood is the key period for developing dietary behavior. Nutritional status in childhood strongly affect their growth during puberty. In this study, we firstly investigated the dietary behavior and nutritional status of the 5th and 6th grade students, then we examined their determinants. A cross-sectional study was conducted with a randomly-selected sample of 284 grade students of 5th and 6th graders in Taipei (male 133, female 151). Questionnaires, anthropometric measurement, and blood examination were used to collect data. The main findings were concluded as follows: (1) Overall, 5th and 6th grade students revealed a high level degree of nutrition knowledge of (the average mean of the score ± SD = 0.80 ± 0.15, score ranging from 0 to 1); dietary attitude tend to be positive (the average mean of the score ± SD = 3.50 ± 0.47, score ranging from 1 to 4). Nevertheless, there are still 25.0% students have a tendency towards abnormal eat attitude. Dietary behavior is generally healthy (the average mean of the score ± SD =3.61 ± 0.52, score ranging from 1 to 5). Among two dimensions of dietary behaviors, “Dietary content”showed healthier than “Dietary pattern” in both genders (3.62 ± 0.55 vs. 3.58 ± 0.65). Influencing factors analyses indicated that dietary behaviors of children are significantly related with gender, self-perception of body size, nutrition knowledge, balanced dietary attitude, socioeconomic status as well as the living area. (2) For nutrition status, 51.6% of the subjects revealed inappropriate nutrition status. Subjects’body mass index (BMI) were classified into normal range in both genders were 44.4% and 52.3%, separately. For male, the second rank was obesity (22.6%); however underweight was the second rank for female (18.5%). This finding suggested that we should not only pay attention to children’s overweight and obesity problems but also to female’s underweight problem. There were no significant differences existed in abnormal rate of blood examination among four groups of BMI. However, in this study we still found obese children’s total protein and triglyceride were significant higher than underweight group. Besides, obese children’s triglyceride was significant higher than normal groups. As to the determinants of nutritional status, bivariate variable analyses showed that only one variable, i.e. self-perception of body size, significantly affect children’s nutrition status (p < 0.05). But gender, grade, nutritional knowledge, dietary attitude, educational degree of parents, socioeconomic status, family type, and living area have all revealed no significant relationships with nutritional status (p > 0.05). Based on our findings, we offer suggestions to the children and their parents, educational institution, nursing practice, nursing education and nursing research institution. We remind healthy dietary behavior should be early developed, and therefore, healthily grow up during their age of puberty and healthy as grown-ups.