ON ROUTE TO HEALTH EDUCATION DIAGNOSING HEALTHY EATING HABITS AMONG ADOLESCENTS

ABSTRACT

Adolescents' general well-being and health in particular, are conditioned by healthy eating habits which many adolescents lack. Learning their actual eating habits, is therefore, a seminal step towards creating an educational curriculum aimed to improve the dietary habits among adolescents, and in the long run create healthier individuals, stronger collective immunity and physical longevity, what was the aim of this research. To accomplish the end, this study has registered the eating habits among Pristina adolescents aged 12-15, focusing on their daily food consumption practices, including meal consumption temporal distribution, meals' ingredient structure and the correlation between eating habits and adolescents leisure time activities (reading books, watching TV, playing video games, etc.). A sample of 209 high school Pristina adolescents was selected to participate in a printed survey conducted in the period between the 19th and 23rd of October 2020, in the heat of the COVID 19 pandemic. The quantitative data collected through the survey was later processed and analyzed by using SPSS data analysis software. The key findings reveal regularity in meal consumption, even in circumstances of global COVID 19 pandemic. Almost all adolescents have three meals a day, (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) with varying times of consumption, with bread (84%) and fruits (71%) being the most frequently consumed food articles, while water (96%) and juice (51%) are the adolescents choice of liquids. As for the snack, 36% of respondents consume snack between lunch and dinner, while 25% eat snacks between breakfast and lunch. The results also revealed adolescents frequent use of social media (75%) and game playing (51%), high engagement in sport (99%), satisfaction with physical appearance (81%), and fairly high gain weight in one year (62%) Cross matching the results showed interesting correlations. Male adolescents with regular eating habits who enjoy spending time on the internet or gaming, have gain weight in the last year. There is also discrepancy in the eating and leisure time activities among urban and rural respondents. The former, have meals late in the day, purchase food more often, have snacks and engage in digital forms of entertainment and leisure activities. Adolescents form rural areas, on the other hand, have more healthy diets, consume home prepared and diverse food and tend to engage more in reading then social media or gaming. The findings justify and demand further actions. They can serve as an interpretative background to state statistics on the effects of bad eating habits among adolescents (increased body weight, blood parameters, vitamin and mineral deficiency, etc.). More importantly, these findings can help advocate for an obligatory school curriculum in healthy food consumption, can help design a program for extra-curricular activities intended to promote healthy lifestyle, and even a digital platform to accomplish the same ends while at the same time more easily penetrate the digital world of social media, frequented by adolescents on daily basis. © 2023, Consulting and Training Center - KEY. All rights reserved.