Introduction:

Good health depends on factors such as nutrition, a determinant to guarantee proper physical, mental and academic state, essential aspects for the individual and social development of any person.

Objective:

To characterize the eating habits and nutritional status of preschoolers in an initial education center.

Methods:

Descriptive, cross-sectional, correlation study carried out in an initial education center in Santa Elena, Ecuador, during 2016. The study population consisted of 125 parent-schoolchild binomials, the school children aged between three and five years. The observational method and the survey were used. The variables studied wereage, eating habits, school level, food acquisition, weight, height. The software IBM-SPSS-Statistics-21.0 was used for data analysis. The results were expressed in average, median, mode, standard deviation, maximum and minimum values. For the comparison between the groups, the Anova test of independent samples and the chi-square test were used, considering p bellow 0.05significant. To compare the nutritional status, the concordance and Kappa index were analyzed, considering a good value as being higher or equal than 0.80.

Results:

As for the parents, 53.60% were young; of them, 32% were between 21 and 25 years old, 85% had completed the average education level, and 26.40% expressed difficulties in acquiring food. The nutritional status in children was poor, due to the consumption of proteins of high biological value (red meat, 3.97%) and foods of poor nutritional quality such as soft drinks (8.32%), sweets (7.94%) and snacks (4.71%).

Conclusions:

The preschooler’s eating habits were characterized by a hyperglycidic and hypoproteic diet, high in sodium, deficient in iron and zinc, which shows low nutritional quality in the food consumed.

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