Professor, Department of Community Medicine, Believers Church Medical College, Thiruvalla, Kerala, India.
Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, PSG Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India.
Indian J Public Health. 2018 Apr-Jun;62(2):146-149. doi: 10.4103/ijph.IJPH_23_17.
Compared to adults, assessment of dietary intake of school children has always been a great challenge in public health practice. Hence, this paper aims to share our experience in overcoming the problems in dietary assessment of large number of school children aged 6-17 years and the practicality of the tool for quickly identifying the broad gaps in the diet of individual Children for providing them dietary counseling. Based on the Indian Council of Medical Research/National Institute of Nutrition recommendations for balanced diet among school children, a simplified dietary gap assessment tool was developed to identify gross gaps in their diet and also a system of scoring it so as to measure effectiveness of the nutritional educational program. The simplified tool was effective in overcoming the challenge of making the children understand the concept of portion size by replacing it with inquiry of frequency of food intake in 'yes" or "no" terms and thereby making it easy to administer and is time efficient enough to enable a large number of students to be screened.
与成年人相比，评估学童的饮食摄入量一直是公共卫生实践中的一大挑战。因此，本文旨在分享我们在克服大量 6-17 岁学童饮食评估问题方面的经验，以及该工具在快速识别个别儿童饮食中广泛差距方面的实用性，以便为他们提供饮食咨询。基于印度医学研究理事会/国家营养研究所为学童推荐的均衡饮食，我们开发了一种简化的饮食差距评估工具，以确定他们饮食中的严重差距，并对其进行评分，以衡量营养教育计划的效果。该简化工具通过用“是”或“否”来询问食物摄入量的频率来代替理解食物份量概念的挑战，从而使其易于管理，并且效率足够高，可以对大量学生进行筛查。
