Abstract

MERINO GODOY, Mª de los Ángeles. Discovering the eating habits in the multicultural school through the children’s debates. Index Enferm [online]. 2008, vol.17, n.3, pp.183-187. ISSN 1699-5988.

Children obesity in Spain and its peak are becoming a great relevance health problem. The fasting, the fast food and the candy`s abuse are more and more popular habits, which generates nutritional disorders like obesity, anorexia or bulimia, which trigger chronic diseases from early ages. Andalusia is one of the autonomies with more prevalence of children obesity and it is also one of the communities with greater immigrant population, which is the reason why most of our schools are multicultural. We have considered this cultural variability in our investigation; focus on children from three to eight. Our study aims to know pupils evaluations about healthy feeding and their own habits, as well as the respect of the nutritional customs from other cultures. The children debate is the selected instrument for this field study that is included in a wider investigation that analyzes the nutritional conduct in the childhood from all aspects: school canteens, families, administration and its policy. As result of these debates, we have discovered that pupils hardly have breakfast; they eat neither fish nor vegetables (because they say that they do not like them). They like fast food like pizzas and hamburgers, but they enjoy them more if sometimes they are made by their own mothers. They lack basic knowledge about eating, nevertheless they are perfectly capable of remember the songs that are played at TV Ads about food. They also lack the eating habits of their own culture, and that’s why problems of contempt or intolerance have not been discovered.

Keywords : focus groups; feeding behaviour; preschool; cultural diversity.