How to promote healthy eating habits in children

• Author(s): Ribeiro, Daniela Marisa Fontes
• Date: 2012
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/9516
• Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
• Subject(s): Children; Physical activity; Eat at home; Parents; Obesity
• Document Type: Master thesis
• Language: English
• Advisor(s): Agante, Luísa
• Contributor(s): RUN

Description

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Childhood’s overweight and obesity are a worrying issue in the world nowadays. The purpose of this study was to provide contributions to the promotion of healthy food by analyzing the impact of physical activity, parents’ influence and home meals frequency on children’s food choices. Structured questionnaires were used and were answered by 172 children between 10 and 14 years old and by their respective parents. Children and parents preferred healthy food vs. non-healthy food presenting the children’s healthy food choices a mean of 4.26 and the parent’s healthy food choices a mean of 4.47 in a scale ranging from 0 to 6. Our results also show that physical activity, parent’s education and home meals frequency did not have an impact on children’s food choices, contrasting to the sedentary behavior and parents’ choices which had a negative and positive correlation, respectively, with children’s food choices. Taking these results into account and using them to advise parents and companies, we underline that parents must guarantee an adequate children’s nutrition after doing physical efforts and control the time children watch TV and play computer games and companies may create marketing campaigns and educational programs in order to promote healthy food, improve children’s eating habits and reduce the childhood obesity prevalence.