Are our rural adolescents eating healthy?: Implications for redesigning school health interventions – A cross sectional study in rural Coimbatore

Background: Adolescence is a period of transition where independence in thinking and behavior is established and food choices that are made are followed for several years, and this can influence their health in adulthood. Hence, understanding the eating habits are necessary to plan effective nutritional interventions in adolescents. Objectives: The main objective of the study is to find out the extent of malnutrition among rural adolescents as well as evaluate their eating habits against recommended dietary food groups and to compare eating habits across gender and age groups. Methods: A cross-sectional study was done among 1425 adolescents from 13 rural schools from 2014 to 2015, and the variables considered in this study were age, sex, body mass index (BMI), and the eating habits of the adolescents. Results: Undernutrition was seen among 23% and overweight/obesity among 8% of adolescents. The habit of taking milk and milk products, fruits, and green leafy vegetables were very poor among the adolescents. Significant association was found between eating habits and BMI. Furthermore, late adolescents had better eating habits, and significant gender difference was seen in certain eating habits. Conclusions: The study shows that it is possible to understand the gaps in eating habits of adolescents, and this can be used to plan tailor-made nutritional interventions to adolescent groups as their eating habits are different and have long-term nutritional and health implications.

A tool for quickly identifying gaps in diet of school children for nutritional educational interventions

Compared to adults, assessment of dietary intake of school children has always been a great challenge in public health practice. Hence, this paper aims to share our experience in overcoming the problems in dietary assessment of large number of school children aged 6� years and the practicality of the tool for quickly identifying the broad gaps in the diet of individual Children for providing them dietary counseling. Based on the Indian Council of Medical Research/National Institute of Nutrition recommendations for balanced diet among school children, a simplified dietary gap assessment tool was developed to identify gross gaps in their diet and also a system of scoring it so as to measure effectiveness of the nutritional educational program. The simplified tool was effective in overcoming the challenge of making the children understand the concept of portion size by replacing it with inquiry of frequency of food intake in 'yes� or 搉o� terms and thereby making it easy to administer and is time efficient enough to enable a large number of students to be screened.