Nutritional status of schoolchildren from municipal schools in a city of Sao Paulo, Brazil
International Journal of Development Research
Nutritional status of schoolchildren from municipal schools in a city of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Received 29th August, 2018; Received in revised form 19th September, 2018; Accepted 19th October, 2018; Published online 28th November, 2018
Copyright © 2018, Iole Pereira Manfrim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
A cross-sectional study was carried out to evaluate the nutritional status of schoolchildren aged 6 to 10 years enrolled in municipal schools in Carapicuiba in 2014. The anthropometric evaluation was performed by weight and height and the classification of the nutritional status by height-for-age, weight for age and body mass index for age expressed in Z-score, compared to the reference values recommended by the World Health Organization. The prevalences in the categories of height, weight and body mass index were analyzed by the chi-squared test and were considered statistically different when p <0.05. Less than 3% of schoolchildren are short or have low birth weight. Comparing boys and girls, no statistically significant differences were found regarding the prevalence of height, weight and body mass index. There was a high prevalence of overweight among schoolchildren in Carapicuiba.