Dietary Knowledge, Practices and Adequacy among Bedouin Pregnant Women

Nutrition in pregnancy is usually socio-culturally shaped which marked by different beliefs and values. These beliefs and values yield taboos and myths that greatly shape their lifestyle. Therefore, understanding the client‟s culture is an important issue in a culturally congruent nutritional assessment and counseling. Aim of the study: to identify dietary knowledge, practices and adequacy among Bedouin pregnant women. Research design: A descriptive research design. Setting: The out-patient clinic of MarsaMatrouh maternity hospital, Egypt. Subjects: A convenience sample of 320 pregnant women. Tools: Three tools were utilized for data collection: Tool I: Pregnant women‟s basic data structured interview schedule Tool II: Pregnant women‟s Dietary knowledge structured interview schedule and Tool III: Pregnant women‟s dietary practices structured interview schedule. Results: Only 4.7% of the study subjects have good knowledge about nutrition during pregnancy. As much as 81.6% of them had fair knowledge and only 13.8 % had poor knowledge. Moreover, there is a statistically significant positive correlation between subject‟s level of knowledge about nutrition during pregnancy and energy, protein, calcium and copper dietary adequacy(0.034, 0.052, 0.026, and 0.037, respectively.)Conclusion: the majority of the study subjects had fair level of knowledge about nutrition during pregnancy. Almost two-thirds of them had inadequate intake of most nutrients according to recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for pregnamcy