A new health education program on dietary variety for the community elderly: Implementation by health promotion volunteers

Objective: Higher dietary variety can reduce the risk of mortality and progressive functional decline. We aimed to develop a health education program on dietary variety that health promotion volunteers (HPVs) could implement among the community elderly.

Methods: According to the elementary school districts, divisions A and B were chosen as the intervention and control groups, respectively. Subjects were the entire community-dwelling elderly population, excluding those who required long-term care. In July 2014, dietary variety was surveyed among 1685 elderly persons from both divisions (A: n = 630, B: n = 1055) by using the dietary variety score (DVS). Invitations to participate in the health education program were sent to subjects with a DVS of 0–3 (A: n = 219, B: n = 359), and 16 subjects from district A and 29 from district B accepted. The health education program was conducted four times in 2-hour sessions, with the HPVs initiating the preparation and implementation.

Results: Subjects who attended more than three sessions were included in the analysis. The intervention group showed significant improvement in terms of DVS compared with the control group (p = 0.002). The number of subjects who felt that they had better control of their dietary habits (p = 0.036) and participation in planning a balanced diet (p = 0.026) increased.

Conclusion: Our program contributed to the improved dietary variety. More studies with larger study samples are needed to increase the generalizability of our results.