Study about nutrition habits in children from the community Sombra dos Eucaliptos, Maceió-Alagoas (Brazil)

Studies about the alimentary habits of children are important since in this stage of life we consume many kinds of diet, that can constitute the basis for future nutritional habits and can be associated to the growing and development of the individual. Usually, children are attracted by sweets in general instead healthy food (fruits, vegetables and so on), and the parents get the mission of looking for manners to be creative to try to improve the nutritional habits of their children. Our objective was to evaluate nutritional habits of children from 2 to 10 years old, from the community of Sombra dos Eucaliptos, in Maceió (State of Alagoas – Brazil). We orally applied a questionary to the parents or children asking for the consumption frequency and food habits of 86 children, between September and November of 2006. Our data showed that the daily protein consumption comes from bean(79%), milk (61.6%) and chicken (40.7%)  ingestion. There is a daily ingestion of rice (93%), followed by 69% of bread and 64% of pasta, theoretically assuring the carbohydrate necessities. The was a satisfactory percentage of daily consumption of vegetables (52.3%) and fruits (36%), but low consumption of liver (1.2%) and pig (3.5%). Candies (69%) and soft drinks (29%) are the most kinds of simple sugar ingested. From those data, we conclude that, besides the strong influence of the means of communication and the ingestion of industrialized food, most of the 86 children have a restrict consumption of food during the week, eating many groups of food (vegetables, cereals, meat), but not reaching the recommended frequency.