Discussion
pulses-based, stunting
Thinness and stunting among female adolescents remain to be among the critical public health burdens in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), including Ethiopia [In Ethiopia, June is known to be one of the months in the non-harvesting season in which most Ethiopians residing in the northern part of the country enter into a state of food stress [The current finding is in line with the finding of a study conducted among female adolescents in the South Nations Nationalities and People’s Regional State (SNNPR), Ethiopia, that reported a significant improvement in the consumption of pulses-based food among participants in the intervention group as compared to their control counterparts [In the present study, significant improvement was observed among intervention group participants at the end-line of the intervention in the consumption of pulses in boiled, germinated, and mixed with rice and/or vegetable forms as compared to the control participants, while there was no difference in the consumption of pulses in soup form among the intervention groups, which is similar with findings of a study in SNNPR, Ethiopia [The reason why the present and those previous intervention studies were effective could be due to the fact that all of the nutrition education intervention studies targeted the locally available and relatively affordable food, focusing on the main barriers of pulses-based food consumption relating to pulses food knowledge and attitude mainly about its preparations and benefits. There are plenty of studies that reported protein source foods of animal origin like meat, egg and dairy are very expensive and inaccessible by most populations in Africa, including Ethiopia [The trial has the following strengths; cluster stratification was applied to minimize cluster-level variability between intervention and control groups, and the effect size of the intervention was adjusted by the consumption of pulses-based food at baseline, school location and participant residence. In addition, this one month nutrition education intervention is more feasible to scale up than those extended interventions. Moreover, the study collected the end-line data in the 4th month from the date of the last nutrition education session, which might have minimized the differential reporting bias due to recall of what has been advised during the nutrition education.