The Effect of Anemia Free Club Interventions and Dietary Iron Intakes Among Adolescent School Girls in Bandar Lampung City, Indonesia

BACKGROUND: Many adolescent girls had a lack of nutrients in daily food consumption. This condition will cause one of the health problems is anemia. AIM: This study was performed to determine the effect of anemia free club interventions to improve adolescent dietary intakes in Bandar Lampung City, Indonesia. METHODS: A quasi-experimental study was conducted to assess the effect of anemia free club interventions and dietary iron intakes among adolescent school girls. The study was conducted at Bandar Lampung City, Indonesia. The sample size included 102 participants of senior high school girls in Bandar Lampung City, consisting of 55 participants for intervention group and 47 participants for control group. Nutrition education based anemia free club sessions for 12 weeks as the intervention group, while the control group did not. The sampling technique is proportional random sampling. Data collected consisted of dietary iron intakes (food recall), nutritional status (body mass index/age), and anemia (cyanmethemoglobin). A paired sample t-test analysis was done to check the association between each independent variable with the group variable (intervention and control). The analysis was done with a 95% confidence interval. p < 0.05 was set as the cutoff value for statistical significance. Data were collected and analyzed by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 20.0 program. RESULTS: This study found the effect of anemia free club interventions on increasing calories, iron, protein, fat, animal protein, vegetable protein, vegetable, and fruit intakes before and after the intervention (p < 0.05). However, there was no effect of anemia free club interventions on increasing carbohydrate intake in grams and portions before and after the intervention (p > 0.05). CONCLUSION: This analysis confirmed an effect of anemia free club interventions to increasing calories, iron, protein, fat, animal protein, vegetable protein, vegetable, and fruit intakes among adolescent school girls