Olufemi Segun Shoyemi¹, Abubakar Ibrahim Hassan¹, Taye Oladele Aro^2,, Olukiran Oyenike Adunni³

Nutrition remains a major aspect of growth and health, better nutrition is associated with improving infant, child and maternal health, robust immune systems, harmless pregnancy and childbirth, low risk of non-communicable sicknesses and longevity. This paper presented some factors affecting the status of nutrition in primary school pupils aged 5-19 years in Kwara, Nigeria. A descriptive method of the survey type was used for the study. The population size of 818,554 out of which 1,322 were sampled by applying a multi-stage sampling procedure. The instruments employed in the study were adopted from the 2007 World Health Organization Nutrition Survey to identify the nutritional status of the pupils. Nutritional status by z‐scores of height‐for‐age (HAZ), weight‐for‐height (WHZ) and weight‐for‐age (WAZ), estimating the prevalence of stunting, wasting, underweight and overweight. Frequency counts and percentages were used to organize the demographic variables while chi-square and Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation Coefficient were used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The data from 1,320 respondents who duly completed and returned the questionnaire were analyzed and reported. The findings showed that 66.7% of the primary school pupils in Kwara State, Nigeria were underweight, while 29.9%, 3.1% and 0.2% were normal, overweight and obese respectively on comparing their BMI distribution with the World Health Organization reference survey using z score for ages 5-19. In addition, stunting and wasting were shown to persist (among the underweight children, 66.7%); proposing that other nutrient deficits or risk factors may be constraining linear growth for a substantial proportion of pupils. Furthermore, all the risk factors have a very strong positive relationship with the pupils’ nutritional status with 0.942, 0.833, 0.735, 0.475, 0.426 for intestine parasitic infection, parental nutrition knowledge, parental education, parental income, birth order, while food security had a weak positive relationship of 0.297. Based on the findings, it was recommended that health educators, health workers and nutritionists should sensitize parents, especially mothers on stunting, wasting and underweight rates of their children and provide specific information as regards healthy lifestyle changes in their dietary patterns, which may help improve their children’s nutritional status.

nutritional status, Kwara state, Nigeria pupils