| Abstract [eng] |
Relevance. Students' health is getting worse every year. Only one third of those children who start going to school are healthy. Sometimes it is caused by disbalanced nutrition, physical inactivity and improper day’s routine. According to scientific research, nutrition and lifestyle of a child is dramatically influenced by the social status of the family, education of parents. Only a few researches have been performed on the infants of Lithuania in this respect. The aim of the work. To evaluate and compare the nutrition and lifestyle of the schoolchildren of ‘Filaretai’ and ‘Atzalynas’ primary schools in Vilnius city. The tasks of the work. 1. To assess the eating habits of the students. 2. To assess the lifestyle and physical activity of primary schoolchildren. 3. To evaluate the condition of health of the primary schoolchildren. 4. To identify the factors that influence eating habits, lifestyle and health of the primary schoolchildren. 5. To compare the eating and lifestyle habits of the schoolchildren of ‘Filaretai’ and ‘Atzalynas’ primary schools. The methods. The study has been carried out by way of an anonymous poll. The written form of 45 questions has been drafted specially for this study by the author of this work, which was prepared in accordance with the customised questionnaire on student’s health and lifestyle by WHO. Two Vilnius city schools participated in the study, parents of 460 students have been interviewed. The data from collected questionnaires have been processed by a computer using a program EpiData 3.1 and analyzed by statistical software Stata 11.0. Conclusions. 1. Primary schoolchildren eat somewhat in accordance with the nutrition recommendations. The majority of primary schoolchildren follow the diet routine, eat varied food, have regular four meals a day. The majority of students (65.7 percent) have daily breakfast. 2. Food supplements are used by 44.4 percent of children, the majority of them are first-formers (p <0.05). 3. The majority of primary schoolchildren are physically active, those who are insufficiently physically active constitute one-fifth of the population. Girls are less physically active than boys (p <0.05). 4. The students sleep too little – the average time of sleep per day is 9 hours among all students’ classes. 5. Most children (57.6 percent) learn well, 22.8 percent learn very well, the rest of the children get satisfactory grades. 6. Infants spend too little time in the open air. Most of the girls and boys spend 1-2 hours outdoors a day. 7. The most common medical disorders seen in school are spinal curvature (57.8 percent developed at school) and increased nervousness (62.5 percent occurred at school) (p <0.05). The vision has impaired to 10.4 percent of children after they started going to school. 8. The education of parents is one of the key factors determining the nutrition and lifestyle of the schoolchildren. The major elements that influence health are fatigue, stress, sleep disorders (p<0.05). 9. The schoolchildren of ‘Filaretai’ primary school followed the nutrition routine and had breakfast more frequently, consumed more organic foods. |
