NUTRITIONAL STATUS OF STUDENTS FROM THE MUNICIPALITY OF ARACAJU/SE

Abstract

The assessment of nutritional status is very important to devise strategies to combat malnutrition, overweight and obesity. The aim of this study was to evaluate the nutritional status of schoolchildren aged between 7 and 10 years, belonging to the State Schools in the city of Aracaju / SE. To this end, we elaborated a table of percentile ranking from the Body Mass Index (BMI), according to the standard malnutrition, normal, overweight and obesity of WHO. The data were compared according to gender and age group of students through analysis of variance with one factor (ANOVA ONE WAY) with significance level of 5% (p ≤ 0.05). The IMC observed that there were significant differences in males between the ages 7-10 (p = 0.00) and 8-10 (p = 0.03), and the female between 7-10 (p = 0, 00), 8-10 (p = 0.02) and 9-10 years (p = 0.02). In the evaluation of Nutritional Status (EN), found that 80.08% of all subjects were well nourished. It was observed that 5.13% of the students were in default malnourished, while 15.6% of all students were overweight or obese. We conclude that a considerable number of students were within a certain range of health risk because of malnutrition, especially in overweight or obese, sending to the necessity of bigger attention to the these reportable diseases