Introduction:

promoting interaction between health and educational teams is essential to build the necessary skills and knowledge in future generations that would enable them to take care of their health, their families’ and their communities’. Most preferences, habits and personal styles are developed at school age.

Objective:

to get to know the habits, behaviors and practices of children and adolescents of fifth and sixth grade attending three public and three private educational institutions in Montevideo and make a diagnosis of the situation to able to plan a subsequent intervention.

Material and Methods:

descriptive, observational and crosssectional study between October and December 2017. An anonymous survey was applied to fifth and sixth grade students from three public and three private institutions in the Paso de la Arena, Prado and Colón neighborhoods. Informed consent and authorization were obtained from the institutional research committee. Absolute frequencies and percentages were used.

Results:

331 school children participated, 73.1% from the public sector and 26.9% from the private sector. Regarding school snacks, 46% of them consume homemade snacks and 75% consume processed snacks. 53% do not consume food during recess. At home 50% eat fruits and 35% eat vegetables every day, 64.3% consume UP meat up to 3 times a week. While 48.3% report running every day, almost four out of ten have never danced, skated or ridden a bike and two out of ten have never played sports. 65% spend more than 2 hours watching screens, 2 out of 10 sleep less than 6 hours and more than 50% use the cell phone or watch television before bed. We found significant differences between the public and private sectors regarding homemade snacking, meat and water consumption.

Conclusions:

we carried out a diagnosis of the habits, behaviors and practices of schoolchildren in these 3 areas, which enabled us to choose priority health topics to work with these schools. The situation is disturbing and it must be addressed quickly at interinstitutional level in order to generate changes in the schoolchildren habits, their families and their communities. We have set up a starting point in order be able to evaluate and measure the impact of actions taken.

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