Background:

Childhood overweight and obesity are a public health problem worldwide.

Objective:

To analyze the relationship between nutrition status and adherence to the Mediterranean diet in school children.

Material and Methods:

Cross-sectional study with 634 school children (280 boys and 354 girls). Nutrition status was evaluated using the body mass index (weight (kg) / height (cm) 2). Adherence to the Mediterranean diet (MD) was measured through the KIDMED questionnaire.

Results:

The Wann-whitney U-test showed that there are no significant differences between boys and girls in BMI (p <0.101) or in adherence to MD (p <0.954). Distinguishing by school year, the Pearson’s χ2 test showed that in Primary there are most schoolchildren with normal weight (p <0.002) and with greater adherence to medium (p <0.036) and high (p <0.001) MD. Among all students, obese students use less olive oil (p <0.006), students of normal weight have a higher consumption of nuts (p <0.001) and sweets (p <0.032), and overweight students were the least likely to regularly eat breakfast (p <0.010). No significant differences were observed between nutritional status and the degree of adherence to MD (p <0.904).

Conclusion:

Although in Primary school most school children are normal weight with medium to high adherence to MD nutritional status is not shown to be correlated to the degree of adherence to MD in any school year.

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