Abstract
This study was designed to provide the basic data of an effective nutrition education for desirable lifestyle and dietary habits to improve the nutritional status for the elderly by investigating health-related lifestyle, dietary habits, nutritional knowledge, and food intake of the elderly. The subjects included 58 elderly men and 146 elderly women. 35.8% had no more than an elementary school education. Most subjects (54.4%) were widows/widowers. Most subjects (71.0%) made over 150,000 won. 52.5% of subjects lived in houses. Smoking, drinking, exercise, the average sleeping time were significantly difference between the gender (p<0.05). In terms of dietary habits, our results showed that 80.9% of respondent eat regularly meals, including breakfast (83.5%). Both sexes prefer soft and salty food. Women enjoys more spicy and salty food compared with men and then shows meaningful difference (p<0.05). Their favorite meals are soup, stew, salad and boiled vegetables. Compared to women, men have a higher rate of correct answers about questions related to nutrition knowledge as showing significantly difference (p<0.05). In a study of dietary habits, they take in carbohydrates with the highest percentage and following by vegetables and fruits. The amount of meat, first and egg they eat is more than the previously. Eating meat is higher men as showing significant difference (p<0.05). In summary, nutritional status for the elderly shows healthy lifestyle and diet about half of those and most them try to live healthy life in future. It is hope that the elderly may need to learn proper nutrition knowledge for healthy lifestyle and nutrition education and counseling for building up healthy lifestyle and desirable dietary habits. Furthermore, it is necessary to start work to establish a baseline nutritious evaluation for the elderly and at a time to study the development of standard eating tool proven reliability and validity, consequently to provide a basic framework for the evaluation of nutritional status.
