Children’s Food Consumption, Snacking Habits And Food Safety Of Popular Snacks In School Environment

Abstract

School-age is a children period of growth and development into adolescence. Therefore, adequate intake of nutrients and food that is safe to consume is very important. According to Bondika (2011), only about 5% of school-aged children bring foods from home, so school-age children tend to buy snacks at school. However, there are potential problems on the safety of snack food sold at the school, namely the hazardous food contamination (microbiological & chemical), the hygiene and sanitation problem during its preparation, as well as the contribution of snack foods as unhealthy source of calories. Ensuring food safety of snack sold at school is very important in order to create quality human resources (MoH 2001). Food safety level of school snacks is still poor and has become a serious problem. One of the ways that can be done is to provide rules or conditions for sellers who will sell their foods in canteen or around the school environment. According to Notoatmodjo (2003a), with the rules that must be obeyed, then it may help the changes of one‟s behavior. The overall objective of this research was to assess food safety of snacks sold in school environment consumed by school children in urban and rural areas. This research used a cross-sectional study design and conducted in six purposively selected public elementary schools (SDN). This study collected data from four types of respondents, namely 1) elementary school children (grade 5), 2) mothers of elementary school children (grade 5), 3) elementary school teachers, and 4) school food vendors or owners of canteen in the selected schools. The research started in November 2017 till April 2019. The study involved selecting sample using purposive sampling method. Three elementary schools in urban area (Tangerang Selatan City) and three elementary schools in rural area (Tangerang District). The total samples from six schools were 214 students. Food profiling was done for all vendors. Snack sold in school environment were categorized into dry food, wet food, and drink. Data consisted of primary and secondary data. On school children respondents, the primary data included: 1) children characteristics, 2) health status and history of childhood disease, 3) food consumption, 4) eating habits and snacking frequency, 5) knowledge, attitude, practice (KAP) of nutrition and food safety, 6) individual sanitation and hygiene. For mothers, the data consisted of: 1) knowledge, attitude, practice of nutrition and food safety, 2) food caring behavior, and 3) hygiene and sanitation in the living environment. The primary data that was collected from the teachers include: 1) teachers characteristics, 2) KAP of nutrition and food safety aspects, and 3) school policies on food sold in school. From school food vendor/canteen owner respondents, the primary data that was collected include: 1) data of vendor characteristics, 2) knowledge, attitude, practice of nutrition and food safety, 3) snack profiles (manufactured and traditional), and 4) hygiene, food safety and environmental sanitation. The most popular snacks based on food profiling were collected for laboratory analysis . The data was collected through interviews to the respondents, filling out the questionnaire and laboratory analysis. Data analyses were include: data entry, data cleaning, statistical analysis, and creating dummy tables. SPSS Statistics software was used to carry out the analysis of comparison on variables between urban and rural and correlation analysis. ii Current study found that mobidity rate of school children in city area (56%) is lower than in rural area (70%), especially on the occurrence of Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. Personal hygiene and sanitation of children in the city is better than in the rural area. There was a significant difference between eating frequency school children in city and rural area (p <0.05), where in rural area there are more students who eat 3 times. There are still quite a lot of students who didn‟t have breakfast before going to school. In regards of snacking habits, most of the students in the city (61.0%) and rural (76.2%) had snack for 4-6 times / week. The contribution of macro nutrients to daily energy and protein intake from street food in the city is 21.7% for energy and 18.1% for protein, while in the rural is 31.6% for energy and 24.1% for protein. Evaluation on food vendors personal hygiene shown that there are 30% vendors in the city and 43.8% vendors in rural area that still pay no attention on hand, hair, nail and clothing hygiene. However, the food sold are considerately safe from food hazards and contaminants since all snack foods sampled from school in Tangerang Selatan City (urban) and Tangerang District (rural) were found to be safed from microbial contamination and forbidden food additives. Only one food (noodle) was considered not safe because it was contaminated by formalin. Based on those findings, the schools should conntinously supervise the practice of selling snacks around the school. Although almost all snacks sold in schools are classified as safe, the presence of formalin in noodles found in one of the school indicates the potential for food hazard. The Department of Education and Culture and the Health Office need to conduct training or training for food vendors and teachers about healthy snacks and sanitation and hygiene management in schools. Thus the school can make policies for food vendors in the school environment related to aspects of personal hygiene and food safety. Parents need to pay more attention to children's food consumption, especially regarding breakfast habits that many students leave behind and the quality of breakfast that does not meet food diversity.