Nutrition knowledge-attitude-practice and effects of relevant intervention among pupils in Jiangning district of Nanjing city

Objective To investigate the nutrition knowledge, attitude, and practice(KAP) and the effects of nutrition education on the KAP among elementary students in Jiangning district of Nanjing city.Methods Random sampling was adopted to select 2434 pupils from two primary schools in Jiangning district and the pupils in one of the two schools received a 4-month nutrition education program from September 2014 to January 2015;all the participants were surveyed with a self-designed questionnaire on nutrition KAP before and after the education program.Results After the nutrition education, the awareness rate of nutrition knowledge increased from less than 40% to greater than 70%;the proportion of the pupils expressing the willingness to change their bad eating habit increased from 83.84% to 92.43%;and there were significant increases in the ratios of drinking milk everyday(79.93% vs.92.18%), taking part in school nutritional lunch program(34.78% vs.49.32%), no leftovers at a meal(57.57% vs.67.01%), washing hands before a meal(54.17% vs.80.10%), not having snack everyday(54.51% vs.67.26%), and having boiled water instead of other drinks as drinking water(76.36% vs.89.63%) compared before the nutrition education program.Whereas, no changes in KAP were observed among the pupils of the control group.Conclusion The pupils in Jiangning district of Nanjing city are lack of nutrition knowledge and many of them have unhealthy diet habits;nutrition education program can improve nutrition KAP among the pupils.