1 Adolescents ’ Knowledge of Diet-Related Chronic Diseases and Dietary Practices in Ghana

Diet-related chronic diseases constitute public health and developmental challenges in Ghana. The Ghana Health Ser-vice in 2007 reported a national prevalence of diabetes of 11.6%, 27.8 % for hypertension and 25 % of women were re-ported to be overweight. Adolescents usually adopt lifestyles that negatively affect their nutritional and health status and increase their risk for development of diet-related chronic diseases later in life. The study was therefore carried out to investigate adolescents ’ knowledge of diet-related chronic diseases and its influence on their dietary practices. The study design was a cross-sectional survey involving 313 adolescents aged 14- 18 years from public and private senior high schools. Structured interviews and diet assessment methods were used to collect information on respondents’ knowledge of diet-related chronic diseases and dietary practices. The data collected were analyzed using the SPSS pro-gram version 16. The Chi-square test and ANOVA were used to determine the relationships between respondents’ knowledge of diet-related chronic diseases and dietary practices. The results revealed that knowledge of diabetes, hy-pertension and obesity were low among the respondents with most of them (89.2%) having fair to poor knowledge of the diseases. Eighty-eight percent of the adolescents ate three or more times in a day. Meals mostly skipped were breakfast and lunch. Dietary diversity of the respondents was generally poor. There was a significant relationship be-tween knowledge of diet-related chronic diseases and the dietary practices of the adolescents. As knowledge of the dis-eases increased, dietary diversity also improved