Effectiveness of a Nutrition Education Program to Improve Children’s Chewing Habits

Table 4

Chewing habits before and after the intervention.

	Group A			Group B			value
	Before	After	value	Before	After	value
Subjective evaluation	()			()
Chewing habits score (points)	29.0 [25.0–32.0]	31.0 [24.5–33.0]	.040	28.5 [23.0–32.0]	31.0 [25.0–34.0]	.004	.597
Objective evaluation
Time-adjusted number of chews (times)	520 [407–713]	628 [531–808]	.000	498 [421–700]	634 [498–854]	.003	.523
Rate of change (%)	22.2 [3.0–47.1]			19.6 [−5.2–57.4]			.577
The number of chews (times)	523 [406–714]	612 [449–783]	.001	474 [363–704]	683 [450–818]	.000
Meal time (min)	29.5 [21.9–37.5]	25.5 [19.5–31.3]	.002	22.3 [17.5–33.1]	23.5 [19.5–32.1]	.635

Median [25–75%]; ; ; ; .
Definitions
The score of chewing habits: total score of seven questionnaire items related to chewing habits and chewing movement.
Time-adjusted number of chews: to consider the influence of meal time by the residual method.
Rate of change: in the comparison of the time-adjusted number of chews, before and after intervention.
Meal time: duration of time spent eating the test meal.
The number of chews: the number of times participants chewed during a test meal.
Meal times: from start to end.
Wilcoxon signed-rank test (two-tailed).
Nonpaired -test (two-tailed).
Analysis of covariance (adjusted with the baseline measurements).