The nutritional knowledge scores of morbidly obese patients selected for gastric bypass surgery

Repeated attempts at weight-reduction might be expected to coincide with an increase in nutritional knowledge. In this study a 30-item multiple choice test was used to compare the nutritional knowledge of 50 morbidly obese patients, selected for gastric bypass surgery, to that of 50 hospital control subjects prospectively matched for age, sex, educational experience, and socio-economic status. Morbidly obese patients knew less about general nutrition than subjects in the control group (P less than 0.005). In addition there was no significant correlation (rs = 0.10, n = 24) between the amount of weight lost one year after surgery and the nutritional knowledge scores. It seems that whilst morbidly obese patients have a relatively poor level of nutritional knowledge, this finding cannot be related to the extent of weight loss after gastric bypass surgery.