Assessment of knowledge and self-efficiency for the use of basic culinary techniques in puerpera in a university hospital

Abstract

The healthy and diversified food introduction represents an opportunity for the child to be exposed to the wide variety of foods that will form the basis for future healthy eating habits. In view of the scarcity of studies that correlate the introduction of complementary foods from the child's six months of life onwards with maternal cooking skills, the present study aims to verify whether there is pre-existence to the puerperium of the mother's cooking skills and, more specifically, to assess whether postpartum women have culinary skills; assess self-efficacy for using basic cooking techniques as well as the cooking skills index. This is a cross-sectional study, which had the participation of 311 postpartum women admitted to a university hospital. Cooking skills were measured in the form of scores. The puerperal women were classified into three strata, according to the scores obtained, three categories were defined, considering the values of the 25th and 75th percentiles as lower limits (low cooking skill) and upper limits (high cooking skill), respectively. The study population showed a high index of cooking skills, as well as a high effectiveness for the use of basic cooking techniques. This study advances in the exploration of the theme, enabling one of the first approaches to the Brazilian reality, especially about postpartum women. It is believed that, even though it is a first exploratory study on the culinary skills of postpartum women attended at a university hospital in northeastern Brazil, its findings can be used as a starting point for future research directions.