How much are children and their parents objective about the children's eating behaviour and body composition?

Abstract

The primary objective of our research was to investigate the nutritional status in Belgrade schoolchildren (aged 12-15). The second objective was to compare the children and parents view about the children nutritional status. The study was carried out in two phases: (a) questionnaires for children and parents (questionnaire-c and questionnaire-p) were administrated; (b) anthropometrical measurement was conducted among children. There were 2263 participants, randomly chosen from seven Belgrade (Serbia and Montenegro) primary schools. At the end of the study, 1555 children completed the questionnaires and had been measured. According to our results, there were 18.1% boys and 11.3% girls who were overweight/obese. Children were more objective in estimating their nutritional status than their parents. Although the participants were offered free counselling, low response rate of only 4.71% was achieved, suggesting that parents should take an active and unbiased role in children's nutritional education. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.