INTRODUCTION:

Nutrition knowledge is a modifiable determinant of eating behavior, important to the development of healthy eating habits that may be differentiating in the optimization of athletes’ performance.

OBJECTIVES:

To translate and adapt a questionnaire on general and sport nutrition knowledge and to study its psychometric properties.

METHODOLOGY:

We performed the translation, back-translation and adaptation of the instrument, including the reduction of the number of items based on its application to higher education students (n = 238) from three different areas of knowledge: nutrition (n= 46), engineering (n = 118) and linguistics (n = 74), and studied its psychometric properties: content validity, mixed groups validity, factorial validity and internal consistency.

RESULTS:

The questionnaire’s content was analyzed by a group of evaluators through a qualitative and quantitative analysis, which resulted in a content validity coefficient of 0.90. Through the assessment of the difference in knowledge between the three groups, and according to the internal consistency and factor analysis, from the 90 items in the initial questionnaire 48 were excluded. The factor analysis and internal consistency were repeated for the final version with 42 items. The questionnaire presents, for each section (general nutrition and sport nutrition), a unifactorial structure and good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha values of 0.883 and 0.720, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS:

This study led to a shorter and with good psychometric properties version of a questionnaire on general and sports nutrition knowledge. Its application will allow professionals in the field to evaluate differences in knowledge between athletes of different sexes and sports, thus establishing more effective and directed educational strategies.

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