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Health is the necessary foundation for the comprehensive development of children. Unhealthy nutritional status of children in all its forms is a global problem. Our research goal was to assess prevailing nutritional status and changes in it among pre-school children in the north of Vietnam. There were several stages in the examination, each performed once a quarter, from September 2017 to March 2018. The results showed that children's height and weight grew. At the initial stage of the examination average age of children was equal to 42 months, average weight and height were 14 kg and 95 cm respectively. At stage 2, average height and weight were equal to 14.2 kg and 97 cm, and at stage 3 they were 15 kg and 99 cm, respectively. All the applied models revealed the correlation between anthropometric indices of children aged 10–60 months and their age (p < 0.05), however, only the model y = 0.2736x + 2.8943 with R2 = 0.8571 revealed a tight correlation between body mass index and age. We applied the WHO standards (2006) to assess the nutritional status of children. After 6 months of the examination we detected an increase in number of children with good nutritional status and a decrease in number of those with bad one that was the most tightly connected with malnutrition. At stage 3 we revealed 15.7% children with stunting, 4.3% children with underweight, and 3.3% with both disorders, among those who received insufficient nutrition. 1.5% children suffered from hypotrophy; and 0.1% children had underweight, stunting, and hypotrophy. Prevalence of overweight and obesity didn't decrease as at stage 1 over-weight was detected in 4.5% cases, and obesity, in 1.2% cases; and at stage 3, they were detected in 5.5% and 1.1% cases respectively. Apart from that, in some cases malnutrition and disorders related to overweight occurred simultaneously: stunting and overweight in 0.6% cases, stunting and obesity, in 0.1% cases.

The study aims to provide evidence of double nutritional burden (including malnutrition and overweight/obesity) as well as the impact of eating habits on nutritional status of preschool children at Nam Hong commune, Dong Anh district, Hanoi. Subjects of study: children aged from 24 to 60 months old at 2 preschools of Nam Hong commune. The study is divided into 2 phases: at the phase 1: a cross sectional study was applied to 1593 children; at the phase 2: a matched case-control study was applied in order to analyze effects of eating habits to nutritional status of children (1 malnourished child / 5 normal children and 1 obese overweight child / 5 normal children, matched pairs in age, sex, class). Research results: the percentage of children with normal nutritional status is 86.8%, however, Nam Hong still suffer a double burden of nutrition when the rate of malnourished children is still high (accounting for 4.2%) and overweight/obesity children is 9.0%, in which the rate of overweight and obesity children in boys is higher than girls (10.9% compared with 6.7%, respectively). Eating characteristics affect malnutrition status of children including: loss appetite (OR=4.3), slowness in eating (OR=2.23), enjoyment of food score (OR=0.69), desire to drink score (OR=0.82). Eating characteristics affect the overweight/obesity child’s include: appetite characteristics (OR=4.24), loss appetite (OR=0.43), fast eating (OR=2.56), slowness eating (OR=0.43), eating more (OR=6.78), eating less (OR=0.31), prefer fat (OR=2.18), food responsiveness score (OR=1.59), enjoyment of food score (OR=1.8), satiety responsiveness score (OR=0.51), slowness in eating score (OR=0.05), emotional under eating score (OR=0.67), food fussioness score (OR=0.72). Keywords Double burdens, malnutrition, overweight/obesity, Nam Hong commune, Dong Anh. References [1] L.T. Huong, N.T. Linh, N.T.T. Ha, Nutritional status and cognitive development of children under 6 in urban, rural and mountainous area of the north in 2012, Journal of Food and Nutrition Sciences 10 (2014) 67-74 (in Vietnamese). http://viendinhduong.vn/research/detail?id=620&catName=cac-de-tai-va-xuat-ban-pham&lang=vi[2] N.T.T. Thu, L.T. 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