Abstract

Adolescents are susceptible to nutritional problems for many reasons. One way to overcome these nutritional problems is to apply a balanced lifestyle nutrition. Peers become one of the prospective mediators to seek to change the value and behavior of health in adolescents. But before peer educators educate their friends, they need to improve their knowledge of balanced nutrition. To analysis the effectiveness of peer educator training on students' knowledge about balanced nutrition. This study is an intervention study. Sampling was done by purposive sampling method and the number of selected samples was 40 students. Data analysis was performed with SPSS version 16 using paired T test to assess the difference of respondent knowledge before and after intervention. The results showed that after peer education training, there was an increase in respondents' knowledge of well-balanced nutrition in the good category, from 17.5% before training to 70% after training, an increase of 52.5%. knowledge of the respondents in the category quite decreased, ie from 45% before training to 25% after training, decreased by 20%. Knowledge of respondents in the category of less decreased as well, ie from 37.5% before training to 5% after training, decreased by 32.5%. The training is done effectively to improve the knowledge of respondents. Nutrition educators who have been trained are expected to transmit the knowledge they have to their peers. Health promotion programs, especially balanced nutrition should be aggressively conducted in schools, considering the school is a place to form healthy behaviors.