Increasing nutritional literacy in teachers: the effect of an educational intervention

Objective (s): Lack of attention to nutrition and having non-healthy nutritional habits, is one of the influencing factors for noncommunicable diseases. In recent years, nutritional literacy, as a abilities to access, understand, appraise, and apply necessary information to make decision related to healthy nutrition, is considered to be a very important health-related issue. This study aimed to investigate the effect of an educational intervention on nutritional literacy of elementary school teachers in Yasuj, Iran. In this quasi-experimental study, 110 teachers of the elementary schools in Yasuj, who were randomly selected in two areas of the city (intervention and control group) were included in the study. Nutritional literacy was measured by using a validated tool for Iranian society, and after analyzing the data, the educational content and structure were developed to improve the nutritional literacy. Intervention consisted of two training sessions, sending two SMS and providing educational pamphlets. Data were analyzed before and three months after the intervention by using Spss16 software. There was a significant difference in terms of nutritional literacy, reading comprehension, food units (P<0.001), nutritional knowledge (P=0.001), computational literacy (P =0.034) and nutrition label (P=0.005) before and after the intervention among intervention group. The difference between the mean score of nutritional literacy in the two groups also was significant. The results indicaterd that the educational intervention was useful in increasing nutritional health literacy among primary school teachers.