Abstract
Introduction: Proper nutrition is extremely important at all stages of human life. Nutritional programming states that either an excess or deficiency of nutrients during the first 1000 days of a child’s life can alter their metabolism and affect their health later in life. Despite widespread access to information on infant nutrition, parents still need to correct their feeding mistakes. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of parental nutrition education on the nutritional status of children during their first year of life and to check whether these changes are still visible after 12 months.
Materials and methods: The follow-up study included a group of parents of 168 Polish infants. Their parents were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: the intervention group received intensive mobile nutritional education for 1 year, while the control group received no intervention. The children were assessed 12 months after the end of parental participation.
Results: Our study showed that parental nutritional education influenced, among other things, the body mass index (BMI) z-score (the difference between the groups was 0.991) and the micro- and macronutrient intake of the children. The influence was still visible 12 months after the end of the study.
Conclusions: The final results of our study showed that proper nutritional education could improve the nutritional status of children at the population level.