Is it possible to improve healthy food habits in schoolchildren? A cross cultural study among Spain and Poland

Abstract

Healthy eating patterns in childhood promote optimal childhood health, growth and intellectual development. In this context, effective educational programmes to promote healthy eating habits during childhood are needed specially in countries where children's overweight and obesity are becoming a serious problem. The main aim of this study was to test the effectiveness of a full healthy eating intervention programme focused on the improvement of healthy habits of children from two European countries (Poland and Spain). For achieving this objective, a new web app named ``Como como yo?�� (How do I eat?) especially designed for school-aged children was used for collecting the data and for making recommendations of healthy eating habits after the questionnaires were completed. Although 407 Polish and Spanish primary school pupils completed the intervention, after data curation, 339 of them were included in the study. Our results showed that the educational intervention was useful to decrease food neophobia in children and to increase some healthy habits. The success of the healthy eating intervention programme was related to childrens food neophobia score. The results allowed us to describe country-related differences in food neophobia, food acceptability, food habits and healthy knowledge. Finally, the healthy eating intervention programme has proved that a change in children eating behaviour is possible. In fact, our findings have implications for formulating several recommendations for educational programmes in different EU countries.