The Gender Comparison of Dietary and Health Behavior of First Grade Middle School Students in Suwon Gyeonggi, Korea

From the onset of puberty or during its progress, eating and health behaviors are important in establishing optimum growth and healthy fitness in middle school students. This study investigated the dietary and health behavior of first grade middle school students(male 260, female 255) selected from 3 middle schools in Suwon. Results were analyzed using the statistical program(SAS ver. 8.1). Usual dietary habits were scored by the Likert scale of 5 points and obtained the mean and standard deviation. Obtaining significant gender difference, chi-square and student t-test were also done. Daily breakfast intake was 70% of all students but some of them ate alone(27.3%). The amount of food intake was slightly less(34.8%) but sufficient food for dinner(53.2%). The purpose of each meal was solving hunger(57.4%). However, they want to change their current eating habits because of an unbalanced diet. Usual dietary habits were similar in gender, but 'apply nutrition knowledge' and 'consider food combination' were better in female students (p<0.01), 'regular meals' were higher in males(p<0.01). With respect to health behavior, the subjects went for daily walks for less than an hour(39.9%) and got 7-8 hours of sleep per day(33.8%). The amount of sleep was sufficient(22.6%) in males but in insufficient (33.8%) in female students(p<0.01). Weight control efforts for reducing(female 27.5% male 20.8%) and for increasing(male 10.6%) differed according to gender(p<0.01). As the result of the above analyses, the direction of nutrition education would be oriented to the nutrition knowledge and food combination applying to the diets of male students and regular meals for females. And also sleep dissatisfaction needs to be altered with taking care weight control trials.

수원지역 중학교 1학년생의 성별에 따른 식행동과 건강행동 비교