Nutritional education intervention by giving snakehead fish meatball to increasing nutritional status of childhood stunting and improvement of mother's care patterns in lamongan district

Introduction: Based on data from WHO, it is known that globally, approximately 151 million (22%) children under 5 years are stunted. One of the factors that often occur stunting in toddlers is low nutritional intake. One of the efforts that can be made to increase fish consumption in children under five is by diversifying products which is fish meatballs substitute with different pumpkin flour concentration. Aims: The aim of this study was to improve nutritional status to children under five years old with stunting by increasing the protein intake through the snakehead fish meatballs intervention. Methods: This research was an experimental design with a completely randomized design consisting of 3 substitution treatments of pumpkin flour. The formula of snakehead fish meatballs was tested using organoleptic test and proximate test. Data was analyzed using Kruskal Wallis test with significant value of alpha=0.05. Results: The results of the organoleptic test on the 4 attributes and proximate test showed that the best assessment was found in the snakehead fish meatball formulation with 5% pumpkin flour substitution. The meatball of this formula contains 17.86% protein, 50.33% water, 0.77% fat, 0.95% ash, and 29.99% carbohydrates contents. The organoleptic test showed the score for appearance was 5.62, flavor was 6.92, taste was 6.50, and texture was 7.58. The result from Kruskall Wallis analysis revealed that only texture attribute showed significant difference of the three snakehead fish meatball formulations (p<0.001). Conclusions: The best formulation of snakehead fish meatball is the substitution treatment of pumpkin flour 5%.