Nutrition education for children?results and perspectives

Recent scientific literature reveals a tremendous change in the health status of children and adolescents caused by malnutrition and changes in general lifestyle. Thus, the crucial value of a sustainable nutrition education has long been recognised as a major component of public health nutrition strategies. This paper describes a study that took several requirements for nutrition education programmes into account by developing and evaluating a new age-adapted version of an existing nutrition education programme. The objective of the evaluation was to draw conclusions about the effects of the intervention’s success. A quasi-experimental field study design was utilised, arranging subjects into intervention, comparison and control groups. For each group, a pre- and post-test was assessed. Between the pre-test and post-test, a period of 4 months elapsed. In total, data from 616 children, 474 parents and 47 teachers were included in the evaluation. In general, all children in the intervention group (IG) across all ages showed a statistically significant improvement of general nutrition-related knowledge between the pre-test and post-test, which was measured in one section of the questionnaire. The comparison between intervention group (IG) and control group (CG) revealed significantly stronger improvement for the intervention group (IG). In comparison with the control group, the intervention group did not show any meaningful improvement in any of the five age groups. Parents, kindergarten-teachers and school teachers of all intervention groups reported serious changes for the health-conscious attitudes in children. In summarising, the presented age-adapted nutrition education programme and its evaluation could show a clear improvement of nutrition-related knowledge and less clear improvements in nutrition-related attitudes and behavioural intentions. A sustainable prolongation of the programme could lead to even higher improvement.