Eating Habits and Physical Activity in Children During COVID-19 Pandemic at Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia

Background: Previous studies showed that the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic period enforced changes in eating habits and physical activity in adolescent and adults; however, there is limited studies has conducted regarding the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on children younger than 12 years old. Therefore, the objective of this study is to determine if there were changes in the eating habits and physical activity during the COVID-19 pandemic in children living in eastern province, Saudi Arabia.Methods: In the present study, prospective cross-sectional design was collected from 2602 participants via an online survey. The QuestionPro questionnaire was available from January 2022 to February 2022. During COVID-19 lockdown, the survey asked the participants about their demographic data, eating habits, and physical activity.Results: We found a change in eating habits with increase values but not significant in the eating habit “too much” p=0.184, “difficult to please with meal” p= 0.249, “asking a lot for drinking” p=0.0312, and “the child get full easily” p=0.041. We found that the main reason for children to ask for food is boredom 53.5% followed by anxiety 24.3%. A change in physical activity with an increase in frequency of physical activity which decreased to “once a month” with p=0.0274 during the pandemic has also been reported in this study.Conclusion: The result of this study highlighted the need to carefully monitor eating behavior and the level of physical activity to avoid the establishing of unhealthy eating habits and prevent long term complication such as obesity in children during periods of self-isolation.Funding: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.Declaration of Interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.Ethical Approval: The IRB approval # 2021-04-292 was obtained from ethical committee in the Standing Committee for Research Ethics on Living Creatures at Imam Abdulrahman bin Faisal University, Saudi Arabia. All participants were fully informed about the study requirements and were required to accept the data sharing and privacy policy before participating in the study. The study was not a clinical trial on drugs, supplements, or foods, but a surveillance on population’s habits. All the participants gave their consent to the data management at the beginning of the web survey. If any participant had not given his/her consent, the web-survey automatically stopped. The anonymous nature of the web-survey does not allow us to trace in any way sensitive personal data.