This study had three objectives: (1) assess the level of prenatal care and background variables related to prenatal health risk; (2) examine food consumption patterns; and (3) identify selected attitudes toward food and nutrition which may influence food intake and nutritional status. However, before interpreting data relative to the study's objectives, it is helpful to first examine it in terms of determining Saudi mothers' overall nutritional status.
With respect to the foregoing, the data most informative of nutritional status is infant birth weight, body mass index, mothers' hemoglobin levels and gestational age. By examining percentages of the sample falling into the unacceptable level (low nutrition status) categories of each of these factors, it is possible to roughly estimate that percentage of the sample whose nutritional status can be considered to be poor; it is this percentage that can be said to be at-risk for low birth-weight infants and therefore for infant mortality.
In this regard, data revealed low hemoglobin levels for 42 percent of the sample, low infant birth-weight for only 4 percent of the sample, poor body mass index for 30 percent of females, and shortened gestation periods for about 12 percent of females. Averaging these percentages across all four indicators, it can be said that, overall, about 22 percent of sample females had at least one sign of poor nutritional status. In other words, a little under one-fourth of sample subjects were, at some level, at-risk for low birth-weight infants which placed them at risk for infant mortality.
One nutritional status indicator, low birth weight, is considered to be a particularly important index of pregnant females' nutritional status (Eastman & Jackson, 1968; Kramer, 1985). Thus, factors that contribute to changes in this indicator are especially significant. Findings (correlational analyses) indicated that parity, body mass index and gestational ag...