Introduction:

Non-healthy food habits boost chronic diseases that represent the main death causes in Cuba.

Objectives:

To assess the effects of a nutritional intervention on the changes in the knowledge of diet-nutrition and food habits of adolescents.

Methods:

It was carried out a participative nutritional intervention with adolescents from 12 to 15 years from Habana Vieja municipality during their 3 middle school years. From 604 adolescents that started the study, 155 formed the ´´promoter groups´´ which leadered the activities implemented. There were applied knowledge surveys on food consumption and habits before and after the intervention. For comparing the scores, it was used t-Student test for paired samples. It was used the analysis of simple variance for comparing among schools and the percentages of right answers in the knowledge questions, intake of vegetables and sugar before and after of the test for the estimation of differences among proportions. It was defined p<0,05 as the threshold of statistical signification.

Results:

The promoter groups showed significative increase of knowledge (p<0,001). There were found differences among schools for promoter groups (p<0,001) and for the rest of the students (p<0,024). In the promoter groups decreased the intake of sugar added to soft drinks (p<0,001) and to milk for all the adolescents studied (p<0,002). There were no changes in breakfast habits, liking fried food, or the consumption of soft drinks, fritters, sweets and pizzas.

Conclusions:

Nutritional education interventions are needed to reach healthier diet patterns and in this way contributing to stop the epidemic of non-communicable diseases; in addition, they allow adolescents to have an approach to food-nutrition topic.

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