Nutritional knowledge and food choice in relation with nutritional status among adolescent athletes of sport special class student

Abstract

Nutritional knowledge is useful in optimizing performance and as a basic knowledge. Nutritional knowledge is one of several determining factors for eating behavior. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between nutritional knowledge, food choices with nutritional status of adolescent athletes. The research design used was descriptive quantitative with a total of 133 participants with simple random sampling. The research instrument consisted of the NUKYA (Nutritional Knowledge for Young and Adult Athletes) questionnaire and Food choice questionnaire. The results of the study showed nutritional knowledge was not related to nutritional status (p = 0.188) while the selection of eating has been associated to nutritional status (p = 0.042). In multivariate terms of knowledge and selection of eating contributed only 5.1% to nutritional status. Accordingly, an educational nutrition program is needed as well as an evaluation in monitoring the nutritional and health status of students to have good physical quality along with knowledge and eating selection.