A Study on the Promotion of Adolescent's Milk Consumption (II): Relationships of Adolescent's Milk Intake Frequency with Food Attitude, Snacking Frequency, Physical Activity and School Vending Facilities

ABSTRACT

In order to investigate the ecological factors affecting milk intake frequency of adolescents, the questionnaire survey was conducted with 929 middle and high school students living in Chungnam urban area through October and November 2004. The subjects consumed milk 8.6+/-6.7 times per week, other beverages 4.4+/-4.1 times per week and drinking water 3.7+/-2.1 cups per day. Of the students 77.3% took balanced meals, 72.8% ate regularly and 36.2% ate adequate amount. About 61% had breakfast everyday and nearly a half students snacked once a day. Nutritional knowledge scores about milk was 7.2+/-1.7 and milk attitude scores was 28.1+/-6.5. The subjects spent daily 1.8+/-1.1, 1.9+/-1.1, and 1.0+/-0.5 hours for computer use, TV watching and exercise, respectively. Milk intake frequencies were positively correlated with excercise, snack frequency, meal balance and regularity, breakfast frequency, food attitude score and milk preference, while showed negative correlationships with TV watching and computer use. Intake frequency of fruit-tasted and chocolate milk showed inverse correlation with nutritional knowledge. Subjects without either school store or vending machine took milk more frequently than those with one or both did. Of the correlated variables, milk preference was the most important influencing factor to milk intake frequency according to the stepwise linear regression analysis, which presented other 5 important influencing factors as food attitude, school vending facilities, excercise, snacking frequency and watching TV. In conclusion, the improvement of milk preference is the most important and effective way to promote milk consumption in adolescents. The favorite ways of drinking milk, nutritional benefit of milk, healthy beverage and good snacking should be taught in nutrition education. Also physical activities should be recommended to students rather than watching TV, computer use and vending facilities selling soft drinks should be limited to be established inside school.