Nutrition Literacy of Elderly People in Region Health 2 under the COVID-19 epidemic

Abstract

Since Thailand is an aging society, and nutritional problems can lead to health concerns of elderly people, a study on nutrition literacy of elderly people in Regional Health Promotion Center 2 during the COVID-19 pandemic was conducted. This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate nutrition literacy of elderly people and to explore factors affecting nutrition literacy of 1,477 elderly people which was selected by multi-stage sampling. The data was collected by an interview and recorded on google forms. The questionnaire consisted of 2 parts: general information and nutrition literacy adopted from health literacy model (V shape Model) of Department of Health, with a reliability of 0.84. Descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic regression were the parameters used for statistical analysis. The results revealed that the majority or 70.5% of the sample was female and 53.1% aged between 60-69 years old. The data also shown that 74.1% of the sample had chronic diseases, 57.4% was self-cared and 65.7% grew vegetables at home. Moreover, 80.4% of the sample had limited overall nutrition literacy, while 19.6% had adequate nutrition literacy. The factors that had statistically significant effects on nutrition literacy of elderly people were demographic characteristic factors including age, level of education, level of income, source of income and income sufficiency, family factors including numbers of elderly people in a household and environmental factors including places to purchase food ingredients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, nutrition literacy should be promoted to elderly people by providing easy and accessible nutrition information about how to select nutritious foods or herbs that can help to prevent several common illnesses in order to promote health and boost immune system against COVID-19.