Assessment of Nutritional Intake and Nutritional Knowledge of Rural Post-Menopausal Women

Abstract

Menopause is one of the most challenging periods for every woman. Balanced diet and healthy life style have a great bearing on their future health. The objective of the study was to assess nutritional intake as well as nutritional knowledge in rural post-menopausal women. The study included 140 disease free post-menopausal women; non-users of HRT recruited from November 2018 to February 2019. Variables including socio-demographic and anthropometric factor, calorie and nutrient intake, food frequency as well as the nutritional knowledge were recorded for each woman. In order to determine dietary intake, information of 24-hour dietary food recall was recorded for three successive days. The results of the study revealed that majority of the respondents belonged to the age group of 45-55 years having mean age at menopause was 50.21±4.05 (45%) of them were belonged to agriculture. Actual mean food and nutrient intake of the respondent was founded to be more than RDA which may be due to their eating habits and economics status. BMI of the study population showed that 35.1% overweight and 14.4 % had grade II obesity. The findings showed that rural postmenopausal women, aged 51.65±5.40 years had energy intakes (EI) 2226±395 (1.43%) above the RDA, consisting protein (1.2%), calcium (5.2%) less than RDA and fat (42.8%) above the RDA. Food habits of the respondent indicate insufficient knowledge of nutritional need and recommendation. Low nutritional knowledge was seen in most of the study population. Nutritional knowledge was positively associated with education and socio-economic status but in this study area most of the women (56.4%) were illiterate, and (44.9%) women belongs to lower income group.