Abstract
To the best of our knowledge, no specific questionnaires on sports nutrition knowledge (NK) have been validated so far in Italian early adolescents. The aim of the present study was to validate a short (26-item) general and sports NK questionnaire in a group of Italian early adolescents. To this aim, the questionnaire was administered to 264 subjects for analysis of internal consistency, and in a subgroup (n = 39) for evaluating the reliability over time. The questionnaire revealed good overall internal consistency and reliability (Cronbach’s α = 0.684) and a highly significant correlation over time (r = 0.977, p < 0.001). Comparison with other validated questionnaires is tricky, because the previous questionnaires were validated in different populations, such as middle or late adolescents or adults, with a higher number of items compared to our questionnaire. Furthermore, data on adolescent NK in Italy are very limited. This study provides a brief, feasible, and validated questionnaire that can be used for investigating sports NK in young subjects. It could be used for evaluating the efficacy of education on general and sports nutrition in both the general population and athletes, and for investigating the relationship between NK and different sports in early adolescence.
Highlights
Nutrition knowledge (NK) is the ability to understand healthy nutrition concepts, and it may influence food behavior and eating habits that in turn can affect the health status [1]
Items of the questionnaire were collected by selecting pertinent items from existing general and sports nutrition knowledge (NK) questionnaires [34,35] or from previous research, in order to represent the entire topic under study
As regards the difficulty index cutoff, 0.1–0.9 was chosen, as in some of the other nutrition knowledge questionnaires targeted at young respondents [15,47,48]—items that were too easy or too difficult are generally removed from final questionnaires, in many studies on sports nutrition, this step is not reported [49,50,51,52]
Summary
Nutrition knowledge (NK) is the ability to understand healthy nutrition concepts, and it may influence food behavior and eating habits that in turn can affect the health status [1]. This has led to a growing interest in NK, in such a way that several tools have been developed and validated in the recent years [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9].
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