The determination of nutrition habits and food consumption levels of apprentices in Samsun Apprentice Training Center

In the adolescent period, development and growing of the body are faster than other periods of the childhood. In this period, children's starting to work is one of the most important problems of Turkey and also some other countries. In this study, it was aimed detecting of nutrition habits and comparing of levels of nutrition quality according to accepted standart values in "working children" who were attending to Apprentice Training Center of Samsun. This cross-sectional study was performed among 195 of 1003 (sampling fraction 19.3%) apprentices who were 14 to 18 years old. In the beginning, the randomly selected apprentices were underwent to poll to determine the existing status. In the second stage, subsequent three days energy and food consumption rates of the randomly selected subject were examined. The mean age of the adolescents was 17±0.1 years and all of them had primary school education. It was seemed that there was insufficiency of energy consumption in 44.6% of the aprentices. and insufficiency of lipid, carbonhydrate, fiber, thiamine, pyridoxine, calcium, vitamin A and C consumption of them were also more than 50%. The apprentices have many problems leading insufficient nutrition. To solve these problems is under responsibility of families, employers and the government. Hence, it must be aimed to improving of economical conditions, respecting and obeying to the laws related with this issue and educating the adolescent workers on nutrition.