Remaja ASIK and Optimized Food-based Recommendations

Good nutritional status among adolescents is a window of opportunity to produce healthy adults or pregnant individuals. Modifying the dietary habits during adolescent girls may be a sustainable approach to ensure good nutritional status among population because those habits tend to stay for a life time. Over many years, there has much effort to overcome anemia. Iron supplementation and fortification have been the most popular and convenient strategies to combat anemia. However, there has not much success due to the high still prevalence of anemia among children and women reproductive age. Food-based approach has been defined as one of the most effective programs to combat or reduce the prevalence of anemia. In the meantime, food based recommendations (FBR) formulation through linear programming (LP) approach has been found to be more effective than the traditional method of developing FBRs called "trial and error". LP approach allows us to develop optimized diet for target population with addition to detect the nutrient problem in specific region. This study therefore aims to identify the nutrient problems in the community, to develop optimized FBR employing the LP approach and to assess effect of nutrition education using optimized FBR in order to improve the nutritional and hemoglobin status among adolescent schoolgirls in rural Malang City. This study was conducted in several phases: 1) cross-sectional study 2) intervention study. Cross-sectional study was aimed to formulate optimized food based recommendations using linear programming. Intervention study was performed during 20 weeks with Remaja ASIK as the tagline which means Active, Healthy, Smart, and Creative. Adolescent schoolgirls aged 14-18 years was the subject of this study and 496 subjects were selected, including 152 for first phase and 344 for third phase. In addition, selected school based on inclusion criteria: 1) not boarding schools; and 2) having large number of students. In doing data collecti