The Effect of Nutrition Education Program for Elementary School Children: Especially Focused on Being Familiar with Vegetables

Park, Soo Jin

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to observe the effect of nutrition education program that promote vegetable eating behavior of elementary school children. Three hundred education thirty two children were surveyed to understand food preference of them. The preferences for vegetables showed the lowest scores and fruits were the favorites of children, who aged ten to eleven, volunteered the program for six weeks. 31.3% of them were not in the state of underweight, overweight or obese. The nutrition education program include teaching guidances and materials in order to children to familiar with vegetables especially. To evaluate the effect of the nutrition education program, change of food preferences, nutrition knowledge and eating behavior of children were investigated before and after nutrition education. When the children finish the program, their preference scores for vegetables showed significantly higher than before the program(p<0.05, p<0.001), except tomato and laver that have high scores from the beginning(>1.5). Nutrition knowledge scores have significantly improved from 57.1 to 66.4(p<0.05). Eating habit for special food has improved(p<0.001) and breakfast skipping has reduced significantly(p<0.05). These results indicate that the nutrition education program can promote children to do balanced eating behaviors.