Dhara Jain¹* and Shruti Jain²

¹1Department of Food and Nutrition, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India
²Department of Food and Nutrition, College of Community Science, PAU, Ludhiana, Punjab, India

*Corresponding Author: Dhara Jain, Department of Food and Nutrition, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India.

Received: August 11, 2025; Published: September 27, 2025

Abstract

Antenatal care (ANC) is a critical strategy in reducing maternal mortality as it facilitates the identification and mitigation of risk factors early in pregnancy. It was observed that Nutrition Counselling, a widely used strategy to improve nutritional status of women during pregnancy is lacking in multi strategy community intervention. So, the present study was planned to determine the effectiveness of integrating nutrition counselling during ANC visit. A module was developed and evaluated by maternal nutrition and health experts and frontline workers. It was pretested trimester wise on 45 pregnant women with 15 pregnant women in each trimester. Significant (p < 0.001) improvements were observed in all the three knowledge domains i.e. dietary habits (9.49), hygiene and sanitation (8.09) and nutrition knowledge (5.86). Therefore, it can be concluded that imparting nutrition education through trimester specific nutrition communication module supported in achieving considerable improvement in their knowledge, helping the target group to effectively modify their diets during pregnancy and adopt the norms of antenatal care given by Government of India.

Keywords: Antenatal Care; Nutrition Communication; Pregnant Women; Dietary habits; Hygiene and Sanitation; Nutrition Knowledge

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Citation

Citation: Dhara Jain and Shruti Jain “Effect of Nutrition Communication Module on Change in Health and Dietary Practices Among Pregnant Women During Antenatal PeriodActa Scientific Nutritional Health 9.10 (2025): 33-48.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2025 Dhara Jain and Shruti Jain. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.