A study into the nutrition status of day and boarding elementary school students

The aim of the current study was to determine the nutrition status of day and night elementary school students, their nutrition habits and their daily energy and food take. A total 586 students, 277 girls and 309 boys, at the age of 12 ? 14 attending to Hamit Tekin Elementary School with a day education and Yaşar Topçu Boarding Elementary School in the town of Boyabat, Sinop were included in the study. Demographic features, nutrition habits, frequency of food consumption and physical activities of students were examined. In the analysis of categorical variables, Chi-Square ( ? 2) test was used. In the comparison of quantitative variable, Student?s t test was used.Of the students attending to the day school, 52.9% of the girls, and 40.4% of the girls attending to the boarding school skipped meals and a significant difference was found between the groups. No significant difference was found between the status of skipping meal of the boy students attending to both day school and boarding school.It was found that students mostly consumed fruit (35.2%), sandwiches and cookies (33.5%), wafers and chocolate (31.3%) and packed fruit juice (22.4%) between the meals. It was also determined that the mostly consumed food between the meals among boarding students were toast, sandwich and cookies as 68.3%, while the rate of consumption among day students was 52.1%.The mean of daily energy intake among the day students for boys and girls were 1957.9 ± 320.4 kcal, 1911.1 ± 305.5 kcal and it was 1915.0 ± 231.9 kcal, 1903.6 ± 242.8 kcal among boarding students for boys and girls respectively. Even though pulp intake at day students was higher, B12 intake was insufficient compared to that of day students. The mean of calcium intake was found rather low in both groups. Daily insufficient iron intake was 6.1% at boarding students, while it was found a bit higher with a rate of 14.2% for day students.Keywords: Adolescent, Nutrition Status, Elementary Education