探討多一份蔬果杯點心對幼兒膳食纖維攝取量及糞便的影響

This study was conducted in a New Taipei City public kindergarten in 2014. We provided an additional vegetable-fruit cup as an afternoon snack. We evaluated the children's dietary fiber intake to assess whether the intake increased and achieved the recommendation, and further studied whether the increased vegetable-fruit intake affected changes in the children's feces. In total, 40 children were enrolled, and three of them had a history of constipation. In an analysis of their anthropometric data, boys in the middle class were taller than girls of the same age. Girls in the upper class had a greater body height, weight, and body-mass index (BMI) than did girls in the middle class. In an analysis of the vegetable-fruit cup compliance, 59.6% of the tomato, 60.2% of the papaya, 43.6% of the guava, and 55.7% of the pear provided were consumed. The dietary fiber content of the vegetable-fruit cup was designed to provide about 2.5～3.0 g/day. In an analysis of the fiber intake from the vegetable-fruit cup, contents from the first to the fourth weeks were 1.5 ± 0.1, 1.2 ± 0.2, 1.1 ± 0.1, and 1.0 ± 0.1 g/day, which showed that the intake gradually but significantly decreased. In an analysis of the children's feces status according their dietary fiber intake, there was a significantly higher proportion of a normal feces status with dietary fiber intake of ≥ 10 g/day than with ＜ 10 g/day (p ＜ 0.05) in the first week, but not in the fourth week.