Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of nutrition education about the Korean food guide to middle school students on food intake measured by food frequency. Three hundred first graders were sampled from two coeducational middle schools located in the small city of Chungnam area, and divided into 167 (74 boys, 93 girls) education groups of one school and 133 (70 boys, 63 girls) non education groups of the other school. Nutrition education was given to the education group for a total of 16 hours and no education to the non education group during the same period. After education, average nutrition knowledge scores of education group increased from 6.40 +/- 2.17 to 6.81 +/- 1.56 significantly, especially boys with a high range of increase and girls no increase. Dietary habit scores improved significantly from 46.2 +/- 6.5 to 49.1 +/- 6.2 in both boys and girls of education group. Of the knowledge and dietary habits, ability of choosing a balanced meal, biased eating to some food, and taking diverse foods at every meal improved significantly in education group. In non education group no significant increases of either nutrition knowledge scores and dietary habit scores were shown. In addition education group showed significant increases after education, in the intake frequencies of rice noodle loaf bread, kimchi, green and yellow vegetables, and soybean soybean curds by 0.27, 0.23, 0.40 and 0.32 servings per day, compared with non education group. These changes were greater in girls than in boys. According to these results, it can be concluded that nutrition education about the Korean food guide improved effectively not only student's nutrition knowledge and dietary habits, but also healthy food intake ability. It is necessary to prepare long-term and continuous school-based nutrition education programs for the students to get into a habit of healthy food intake.

• Keywords: school-based nutrition education; Korean food guide; food intake frequency; nutrition knowledge; dietary habit