ABSTRACT

This study was carried out to assess dietary diversification of school lunch box of pre-school children (2-5years) and their anthropometric status in Umuahia North, Abia State. Questionnaires were administered to mothers and caregivers of 226 randomly selected pre-school children aged 2-5years, which includes sociodemographic characteristics, food habits, dietary diversity and the child's food lunch. Anthropometric status of the children was calculated using WHO anthro. Data obtained were analyzed using descriptive statistics such as frequencies and percentages, mean and correlation. The result showed that 51.8% of the children were within the age of 2-3 years, some (34.9%) were 7 and above in their household. Similarly, 54.4% and 49.6% oftheir fathers and mothers were civil servants. Slightly above half (53.1%) ofthe children were within the age of 3-4 years, majority (81%) had water closet. Some (43.8% and 37.2%) of the respondents get their drinking water from bore hole and sachet water, respectively. About 61.1%, 50.9%, 48.7% of the children eat main meal with the family, eat the same meal with the family and sit down when having their meal, respectively. Similarly, 44.2% and 54.4% of the children very often eat their lunch food and carry their lunch food to school weekly, respectively. Majority ofthe children’s usually consuming less than four food groups in a day. Meaning that their parents had poor knowledge on diversity and the children were not feed based on WHO recommendation. According to their anthropometric indicators, majority ofthe children were normal while prevalence of stunting, underweight and wasting was common among 25.7%, 9.3% and 3.1% of the children, majority (92.5%) of the children consumed less than four food groups with low mean dietary diversity of 0.43±0.13 which is below four. Similarly there was no significant relationship between dietary diversity scores of the children and their anthropometric indices such as height for age, weight for age and BMI for age. In conclusion children were found to be stunted probably due to low level of dietary diversification observed in this study. This could be due to mother’s tight schedule as most of them were civil servant. This shows the need for the parents these children to diversify the foods given to their children, by including foods from animal source fruits and vegetable groups, respectively.