Abstract

  Nutrition status is the general conditioning of the body while nutrition assessment is a systematic process of verifying and interpreting data to make decisions about the nature and cause of nutrition-related problems. The present study was conducted to assess the nutrition status of school-going children age 8 - 16 years in Lahore city, Pakistan. The study aim was to identify the children who were at risk of malnutrition. Nutritional assessment was carried out among both genders male and female. It was a cross-sectional survey and the sample size was two hundred (200). Randomly, male and female students were selected. A questionnaire was designed to collect data. An interview technique was used to fill the questionnaire. Questions were related to demographic data, anthropometric data, frequency of meals consumption and food frequency data. Data were analyzed by using SPSS version 22. Data were presented in tables (percentages) and pie charts. The present study result showed that most children have normal body mass index percentile. Children were consuming eggs, wheat flat bread without oil (Chapatti) and milk on a daily basis. Mostly children were taking breakfast, lunch and dinner on a daily basis. Most of them were not taking bedtime snacks. Few children were consuming miscellaneous and fast foods. So, based on the results it was concluded that the majority of school-going children have healthy eating habits and good nutritional status.

Keywords: Nutrition Assessment; Weight; BMI Percentile; Dietary Habits; Food Frequency Questionnaire

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Citation

Citation: Hira Akram., et al. “Assessment of Nutrition Status of School-Going Children of Age 8 - 16 Years: District Lahore - Pakistan".Acta Scientific Nutritional Health 4.10 (2020): 16-25.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Hira Akram., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.