A comparison between food intake frequency and BMI calculation among children of 5th grade elementary public and private schools of a city in the northwest of the Estate of Sao Paulo

Introduction: For the last couple of years, it was possible to observe a change in the world’s population pattern of food intake, like a significant increase in the consumption of high calories-density food. According to this change of cenario, the UN declared obesity as a world epidemic in 1997. According to the declaration, the highest numbers of children obesity relies on countries that are still in development, like Brazil, where those levels prevail on the privileged socio economics classes, meanwhile, in periphery, rural and on assessments regions, malnutrition has the highest numbers. Objectives: Because of that, this work objectifies to analyze the relation between BMI of children from 5th grade Elementary School of Catanduva-SP, aiming to identify if there is any differences on the food intake pattern of these children, as well as, the Educational Institution they are registered to, if private, or public. This data is going to be related to the socio economics and social demographic conditions of the children’s family. To do that, there are going to be applied questionnaires that evaluate the food intake frequency and the social economics status of the families. After the questionnaires have been applied to the adult responsible for answering it, the height and weight of each child is going to be measured , according to the given consent of the legal adult responsible for signing the informed consent form. Having as a purpose to contribute to the solving of children's nutrition problems, such as overweight and malnutrition, doing that by analyzing the nutritional profile and BMI, comparing them to the kind of Educational Institution the students searched goes to. Methods: This is an observational descriptive cross-sectional study that has been made by an online questionnaire sent to the parents of students of Elementary schools in Catanduva. In addition, measures of height, weight and the age of the research subjects. Analysis of data was conducted by the software R Studio™. T-tests were conducted by bootstrap to compare means and Fisher’s exact tests to compare proportions. The study was approved by the local ethics council (number 6.151.084; CAAE: 703449423.8.0000.5430). Results: Number of study subjects was 92, being 60 from public schools and 32 from private schools. Besides, 45 males and 47 females were identified. The average weight and height of those individuals, on the date of birth was 3.11 Kg (SD=0.51) and 47.41 cm (SD=2.96), respectively. The average BMI was 19.83 Kg/m2 (SD=3.83). As for the comparison between schools, BMI for the public's ones was 19.88 Kg/m2 (SD=3.93) and 19.75 Kg/m2 (SD=3.76) for the private’s ones. The difference between BMI observed among the two groups was 0.135 Kg/m2 [CI: -2.02 - 1.71; SE=0.94], not being statistically significant (p=0.89). Conclusion: There was not a significant difference, as was shown by the statistics, between the BMI of students of public and private schools in the city of Catanduva. That result differs from the literature, which has shown that more financial advantage has contributed to an increase of Children’s BMI in the countries in development. That difference can be as a result of a lower number of study subjects in this research, needing, with that, to increase the sample to obtain more satisfactory results.