Evaluation of Public Health Nutrition Education Program for High School Girls

ABSTRACT

Impact and process evaluations were performed in order to verify the effectiveness of a public health nutrition program developed for child-bearing aged women in Korea. Participants included 58 high school girls who were divided into two groups. Each group received four 50 - 60 minute nutrition education lectures regarding healthy eating, osteoporosis, constipation and nutrition labeling in every two weeks. Each session took 50 - 60 minutes. Regarding nutrition knowledge, there was a significant increase of degree of perception (p = 0.0004), but no change in degree of accuracy after implementation (p = 0.9522). Nutrition education was also effective in attitude change, showing more participants were ready to change their eating behaviors in terms of meal regularity (p = 0.0455) and less processed food intake (p = 0.0143). After implementing nutrition education, effective behavioral changes were observed in milk consumption (p = 0.0037) and meal regularity (p = 0.0882) as well as daily activity such as stair use (p = 0.0701). However, nutrition education had no effect on body mass index and perceived health status. In process evaluation conducted by a 9 item questionnaire, grand mean score was 4.17 +/- 0.72 out of 5. Proportion of items with scores higher than 4 ranged 68-91%. These results suggest that the nutrition education program used in this study was effective and useful. For a wider use of this program, more research was recommend for a strategy development of program diffuse.