Eating Behaviors and Food Preferences of Mentally Retarded Children according to the Degree of their Handicap

Park, Young Sook; Park, Ki Soon; Kim, Chang Im

Abstract

The handicapped frequently suffer from inappropriate food intake often resulting in overweightness, malnutrition, and poor growth and development. Our study was done on 7 to 12 year old mentally retarded children attending a special education school in Seoul. We administered questionnaire surveys and 3-day dietary recalls of the subjects, with help when needed from their stay-at home or their care-giving teachers. The questionnaires covered the general characteristics and dietary behaviors of the subjects. The degrees of handicap of the 142 children ranged from the trainable (54.9%), the educable (31.0%), and the non-trainable (14.1%). Of the children studied, 70.4% had 'breakfast always', which was higher than normal. Appetites were highest in the Down's Syndrome group. We found that the more serious the handicap, the higher the breakfast eating ratio and appetite level. The main reason for their missing breakfast differed accroding to the handicap level: 'late rising' in the educable and non-trainable groups but 'no appetite' in the trainable group. Most of the children (52.2%) spent less than 20 minutes eating their meals, the parents described their children's dietary habit problems as a pica (22.3%) or overeating (17.3%), and they indicated that teaching the children how to use spoons and chopsticks (33.1%) was the most stressful. Actually more than 85% of the subjects could not use chopsticks, and skill of using cutlery was significantly different according to the degree of handicap. The food preference for milk products was the highest. It was interesting that the handicapped who had serious food pica didn't like food groups such as grains/starches, meats/fishes/eggs/beans or vegetables/fruits.