Abstract
The purpose of this study was to discover the conditions under which children eat lunch. The subjects were children in the day-nursery in Koriyama city, Fukushima Prefecture, who were 4 and 5 years old,11 boys and 13 girls. Dental examinations were first carried out, and for 8 days the sorts of menu such as hamburg steak, the sorts of utensils used to eat lunch such as chopsticks, forks and spoons, the time from the beginning to the ending of lunch, and the time of concentration on eating lunch, were surveyed at lunch time in the day-nursery. The menus surveyed were of 4 sorts in 8 days, and were the same in pair days. The heights, and weights and Kaup's indexes of the children were also surveyed, and the questionnaires on their personarities, abilities to exercise and the likes and dislikes of foods which they ate, were investigated, as well as the relationships between their concentration on eating lunch and the other tiems. Also their dental examinations were analysed, by means of discriminant analysis of the1st class of Hayashi's quantifying theory.
The results were asfollows:
1) The utensils they used to eat lunch weredifferent by according to the menu, especially when eating hamburg steak or curry and rice.
2) The average time a child took from the beginning to the end of lunch was approximately 30 minutes.
3) The average time a child concentrated on eating lunch was approximately 15minutes, but was almost the same even fordiffering menu.
4) Most children concentrated on eating lunch for a period of 15 minutes from the start, soon lost interest somewhat in eating lunch between 15 and 30 minutes, and concentrated again after 30 minutes from the start.
5) Vegetables were the most common of the foods which were leftover at lunch, and were disliked by more than90% of the children.
6) It was shown by discriminant analysis that the following children needed a period of concentration on eating lunch in followingorder: those who did not have higher carious teeth than C3, those who had more the number of times which were leftover in lunch, those who had dislike what they ate, those who had larger Kaup's indexes and bette ability to exercise than the average, those who took a shorter time from the beginning to the ending of eating lunch than the average, those who had abnormalities in dental alignment and who were selfcomposed.
