• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.30 no.10
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• pp.1219-1228
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• 1997

This stusy was designed to develop nutrition education program for the primary school children served by the national school lunch program and to evaluate ist educational effects. Subjects consisted of 61 elementary school children(30 in the control group and 31 in the treatment group) in the 5th grade. Only the treatment group participated in a twelve-week nutrition education program. To evaluate the effects of the nutrition education program, the control and treatment groups were given a pretest and posttest for nutrition knowledge, food attitude, food habits, food preference and plate wastes before and after nutrition education. The results obtained are summerized as follows ; the nutrition knowledge test score (30.4) of the treatment group was significantly higher than that (17.4) of the control group after nutrition education . However, there was no significant difference between the two groups in food attitude test scores after nutrition education. We also did not find any difference induced by nutrition education or the food preferences of the treatment group. After nutrition education , the amount of plate waste of some menus were significantly decreased in the treatment group, but the amount of plate waste of the control group was not significantly changed. However, there was no significant difference in the post test scores above food habits between two groups. It was concluded that a twelve-week nutrition education program can improve nutrition knowledge and decrease plate waste but is not enough to change food attitude , food preference and food habits. It can besard that the two components of foodservice are nutritional foodservice and nutrition education. Foodservice management alone without nutrition education is hardly enough to improve the nutritional status of school children. The result of this study indicate that applying the nutrition education program to elementary school children who are served by the national lunch program can maximize the effects of the national school lunch program.