Knowledge of good nutrition, physical activity and sleeping habits in pre-schoolers

ABSTRACT

Children's knowledge about food and nutrition is very important for the develop-ment of appropriate patterns of eating behaviour. Nowadays, because children's input is becoming to get more importance in parents' decisions about nutritional choices it is important to contribute for their knowledge development regarding not only nutrition or food but also healthy habits regarding sleeping and physical activities. The purpose of this study was to contribute for the assessment of nutrition/food preferences in pre-schoolers and the contribution of gaming for nutrition/food knowledge evaluation. It also intended to establish a relation between children's BMI and the knowledge of nutrition/food and good sleep and physical activities habits. An observational, cross-sectional, quantitative study was conducted with 364 children's attending preschool from a metropolitan area of the norther region of Portugal and their parents. Food preferences varied from pasta (13.4%) to meat (8.8%) or tomatoes (6.3%) and undesired foods were, among others, fish (16.2%), soup (13.2%), tomatoes (12.6%) and onions (10.7%). Preschoolers showed high levels of knowledge regarding food categorization (92.3%), good sleeping habits (90.1%) and good physical activities habits (94.0%). Results showed significant differences for sleeping habits knowledge with lower BMI (kg/m2) for children that gave correct answers (M = 16.35, SD = 2.04 vs. M = 17.62, SD = 2.37). Children with increased BMI showed more risk of poor knowledge regarding good sleeping habits (aOR = 1.33, 95% CI = [1.07-1.69]). Parent's low education was found to be a risk factor for children's poor knowledge of good sleeping habits (OR = 8.21, 95% CI = [1.85-35.55])

RESUMEN

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