Document Type

Article

Abstract

Background:

School feeding programs have the potential to supply children with healthy school food, alleviate short-term hunger, and improve children's educational outcomes.

Objectives:

We linked community kitchens to a subsidized school snack intervention and assessed the impact of this intervention on nutritional (diet diversity, hemoglobin, and anthropometry) and educational (attendance and academic performance) outcomes of Palestinian refugee schoolchildren.

Methods:

We collected data from 1362 students (aged 5-15 y) and their parents at baseline, and at an 8-mo follow-up in 2 control and 2 intervention schools. We conducted linear, logistic, and negative binomial regression analyses to assess changes in outcomes of children participating in the intervention schools compared with children in control schools (intention-to-treat). We also assessed the impact of the snack intervention in children who participated ≥50% of the time (HP, high-participation) compared with those who participated < 50% (LP, low-participation), or who only received nutrition education (control) (per protocol). All the analyses were adjusted for child age and gender, maternal education, household expenditure, and school-level clustering effect.

Results:

At endline, there were 648 children in the control group, and within the intervention group, 260 children were LP and 454 were HP. There was a significantly greater increase in overall diet diversity score and dairy consumption in the HP group compared with controls. Both LP and HP groups were more likely to consume proteins, and less likely to consume desserts than controls. Furthermore, the HP group had a significant increase in hemoglobin, and both LP and HP groups had a significant decrease in school absenteeism compared with controls.

Conclusions:

This community-based school nutrition intervention had a positive impact on diet diversity, hemoglobin, and school attendance of children.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1093/cdn/nzaa164

Rights

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Nutrition. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com

APA Citation

Jamaluddine, Z., Choufani, J., Masterson, A. R., Hoteit, R., Sahyoun, N. R., & Ghattas, H. (2020). A community-based school nutrition intervention improves diet diversity and school attendance in Palestinian refugee schoolchildren in Lebanon. Current Developments in Nutrition, 4, nzaa164.https://doi.org/10.1093/cdn/nzaa164

Download

Share

COinS