THE EFFECT OF NUTRITION EDUCATION ON THE ENHANCEMENT OF HEALTHY FOOD KNOWLEDGE OF SCHOOL AGE CHILDREN

Abstrak

Nutrition education is an educational program to increase knowledge and attitudes toward nutrition.
Higher nutritional knowledge will affect food consumption attitudes and behaviors. Nutrition education
includes several activities as part of a two-way communication process for knowledge improvement
which can help one understand and overcome nutrition problems. This study aims to determine the
effect of nutritional education provision on the enhancement of children's healthy food knowledge and
provide information on the proper and correct consumption of healthy foods in the case of public
elementary school of 16 Purwodadi, Grobogan. In this study, 66 fifth graders were involved as
respondents. The respondents were divided into 2 classes, namely, the education class and the noneducation
class. This research began with a pre-test to collect initial data, followed by provision of
education four times over a period of three days for the education class. After 2 months, a post-test
was conducted to collect the final data using online questionnaire. The results showed that the
provision of education did not significantly affect the respondents’ knowledge about healthy food but
could change the consumption behavior for some food. However there was a differences in mean
value of knowledge after education for some questions. In the true/false questions about junk foods,
two results were found to change after giving a nutrition education. Such efforts need to be done to
improve food consumption and consumer behavior along food.
Keywords: Nutrition education, fast food, healthy food