Assessment on Dietary Habit and Nutritional Status of Preschool Children in Horo Guduru Wollega Zone, Oromia Region,Ethiopia

Abstract

Pre-school children are the most vulnerable group because of their high nutritional needs for growth and development. As a result, if children or infants can not be nourished well at this stage they will be exposed to some problem in their future life. Therefore, this study was designed to assess dietary habit and nutritional status of preschool children aged 4 to 7 years in selected Kindergarten school of Horo Guduru Wollega zone.  A community-based cross-sectional study design was conducted on total 440 of preschool children from March to June, 2016. A semi structured interview and questionnaires was used to collect information in the areas of socio-demographic, dietary habit and nutritional status of preschool children. Dietary habit data were gathered by using quantitative food frequency questionnaire and Anthropometric measurements of preschool children were taken and nutritional status was generated using WHO Anthro v.3.2.2. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0 was used to perform descriptive statistics. This finding showed that 70.9% of preschool children's daily meal frequency, breakfast, midmorning, afternoon and dinner were more among children in study area. In addition to this a high proportion (84.1%) of preschool children had habit of skip meals. The result also showed prevalence of stunting and wasting of preschool children were 30.7% and 20.2% respectively. Therefore, nutrition education should be given for community of preschool children to manage acute malnutrition (wasting) and chronic malnutrition (stunting) and improve dietary habit.

Keywords: Dietary Habit, Nutritional status, Preschool children