The purpose of the study was to examine the adolescents' awareness and practice of Dietary Action Guide for Adolescence, which was developed by the Ministry of Health & Welfare. Subjects were middle and high school students, selected one class each from all of the 16 provinces in Korea, which were 32 schools and 998 students all together. The subjects were asked to self-evaluate the degree of awareness and practice of Dietary Action Guide using the 5 point-Likert scale from July to September, 2010. On average, 55.1% of the students responded that they were aware of the Dietary Action Guide and 49.4% answered that they put Guidelines into practice. The average score of awareness and practice were 3.54 ± 0.24 and 3.42 ± 0.33, respectively. The awareness score was higher than those of practice score in all the questions in the 6 categories. Awareness score of female students was higher than those of male students but there was no difference by residence area. Awareness and practice of the nutrition education-experienced were higher than those of the inexperienced. Practice score was higher among middle school-students compared to high school students, which reflected the opportunity of taking nutrition related classes. This finding shows that nutrition education for adolescents is important to change their dietary behaviors regardless of gender, residence area and school level. (Korean J Community Nutr 17(2) : 133~145, 2012)

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