Abstract
The ‘Planning Health in School’ programme (PHS-pro) is a behavioural change intervention to assess and improve the eating habits of children, particularly the intake of fruit and vegetables, and to guide them towards healthy choices. The programme and its educational components are based on the Transtheoretical Model of stages of change to integrate nutritional literacy and build up problem-solving and decision-making skills. Children (n = 240, ages 10–12) of one large suburban school in Porto’s metropolitan area (Portugal) were evaluated throughout PHS-pro implementation during one school year in a repeated time–series design. Children’s outcome evaluations were conducted through seven 3-day food records for nine eating behaviour, documented after each learning module and through participatory activities which analysed attitudes, preferences and expectations. Changes were observed in children’s eating behaviour, supported by changes in motivation as perceived in their attitudes and expectations. Significant changes were found in a higher consumption of vegetable soup (p = 0.003), milk products (p = 0.024), and fruit (p = 0.008), while the consumption of high-energy dense food (p = 0.048) and soft drinks (p = 0.042) significantly decreased. No positive effects on fried food, water, vegetables and bread consumption were found. The PHS-pro intervention proved to be effective in developing healthy eating behaviour in young people.
Highlights
The participation rates in the data collection of the other six 3-day food records applied during the intervention were 91.1% in Food Record 1 (FR1), 92.4% in Food Record 2 (FR2), 87.9% in Food Record 4 (FR4), 82.2% in Food Record 5 (FR5), 59.2%
Considering that the LM6 was dedicated to the sports topic and active living, and since the FR6 had a relatively low returning with the worst children’s participation rate, the FR6 data was withdrawn from the analysis
Three elements of the programme seemed essential to the achievement of significant results: behaviour commitment based on the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of stages change, the participatory activities included in the learning modules, and children involved in their decision-making goals and feedback
Summary
A healthy diet can provide all the conditions for optimum growth during childhood and adolescence and prevent all forms of poor nutrition to move away from the main risk factors of the obesity epidemic and related chronic diseases [12]. For this reason, helping children in the changing process for better eating behaviour is a much-needed measure, and school-based health promotion programmes are clearly identified as the most effective strategy to promote healthy behaviour among young people [13,14]
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