[Effects of nutritional education on improvement of nutritional knowledge of infant's mothers in rural area in China].
OBJECTIVE
To investigate the knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) of young children's mothers on infant feeding and to evaluate the effects of nutritional education in the rural areas.


METHODS
A cluster sampling method was used to select the local health station. Five hundred and fifteen mothers, who had infants with age of 4 - 6 months, were recruited for the questionnaire survey on the nutritional knowledge in rural areas of Tianjin municipality. The mothers were randomly divided into intervention group I (160), intervention group II (180) and control group (175). The mothers in the intervention group I were educated with feeding guideline on infants and young children and had had Group lectures and advisory from experts about maternal and child nutrition for teaching them how to feed their children; while, the mothers in the intervention group II were trained with feeding guideline on infants and young children by themselves; and the mothers in the control group received routine guidance at the local health station. The follow-up evaluation on nutritional knowledge of the mothers in each group was carried out after 3 and 6 months intervention, respectively.


RESULTS
The educational background had significant effect on KAP scores: KAP scores of the mothers with primary education or less (8.3 +/- 2.2) were significantly lower than that of the mothers educated with high school (9.4 +/- 1.6) and university (9.6 +/- 1.8) (LSD t = 3.70, P < 0.001). After being educated with feeding guideline on infants and young children, the knowledge of infant's mothers was greatly improved and KAP scores of the mothers after intervention were higher than that of the baseline (F = 183.556, P = 0.006); the percentage of correct answer on nutrition knowledge in the intervention groups was significantly higher than that of the control group. At six months of intervention, the KAP scores of intervention group I (12.0) and intervention group II (11.6) were higher than that of the control group (10.5) (LSD t = 5.96, P < 0.001; LSD t = 4.25, P < 0.001).


CONCLUSIONS
Providing nutritional and health education to the infant's mothers should be helpful for improving infant's feeding pattern and ensuring the adequate growth and development of infants.
Yin
Shi-an
SA
National Institute for Nutrition and Food Safety, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, China. shianyin@gmail.com
Li
Nan
N
Yan
Zhi-yue
ZY
Pan
Lei
L
Lai
Jian-qiang
JQ
Zhao
Xian-feng
XF
D000328:Adult; D002681:China; D005260:Female; D006266:Health Education; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007227:Infant Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers / Q000193:education*; D012424:Rural Population