Nutritional Knowledge and Attitudes of Dental Students

Abstract

The nutritional knowledge and attitudes of 230 dental students were studied. The students answered 68.6% of the nutritional knowledge questions currectly, but the test scores were low because they were adversely affected by the degree of certainty. First-year students scored significantly higher than fourth-year students. There was no significant difference between scores of men and women. Knowledge scores were highest for questions on nutrition and oral health and lowest for those on nutritional assessment. Dental students generally expressed favorable attitudes toward nutrition and nutritional care of patients. They agreed that dentists were vital members of the health team and had a responsibility to become involved in health screening and nutrition education of patients. Dietitians were seen as valuable resources to be consulted about nutrition education of the dental patient. More first-year students supported the idea that dentists should prescribe nutritoinal supplements for patients, whereas more fourth-year students were undecided about this matter. There were no differences in nutrition attitude scores attributable to gender of the student or year in dental school. In this study, nutritional knowledge scores did not correlate with nutrition attitude scores.