Are our rural adolescents eating healthy?: Implications for redesigning school health interventions – A cross sectional study in rural Coimbatore

Health-Related Lifestyle Among College-Going Youth in Bhubaneswar, Odisha

“…In the current study, out of 54.9% of the participants who had >2 meals/day, 54.4% were females, while 56.2% were males. Here 45.1% of them had <2meals/day, of which 45.6% were females, and only 43.8% were males; whereas, in a study by Ganesan et al [1], 94.7% of the females had more than two meals/day while 90.6% of the males were having less than two meals/day, which was contrary to the findings of our study.…”

“…Likewise, in a study by Musaiger et al [20], 51.9% of the females were consuming vegetables more than four times per week, compared to 40.4% of the male participants. In a study by Ganesan et al [1], 36.2% of male participants had green leafy vegetables in comparison to 33.5% of the female participants, which disagreed with the findings of our study, where more number of females were seen to be consuming green leafy vegetables.…”

“…More junk food consumption by males could be attributed to more frequent pocket money obtained by the males. In a study by Ganesan et al [1], 64% of females preferred eating fast food compared to 54.8% of males. This finding was in contrast with the findings of our study.…”

“…Youth is a time when a person develops a variety of healthy and unhealthy habits that will follow them throughout their lives [1][2]. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that nearly two-thirds of premature deaths and one-third of the burden of disease in adulthood are associated with inappropriate behaviors or lifestyles that have begun in the youth.…”

High dietary micronutrient inadequacy in peri‐urban school children from a district in South India: Potential for staple food fortification and nutrient supplementation

“…This indicates that, though the children were living in a food environment with higher food access and consuming foods from different food groups, the quantities of the micronutrient‐rich foods consumed are less. Similar consumption patterns are also reported in adolescents from other parts of India (Ganesan, Chacko, & Muhammad, 2019; Rathi, Riddell, & Worsley, 2017; Shaikh, Patil, Halli, Ramakrishnan, & Cunningham, 2016) as well as the neighbouring country, Bangladesh (Ahmed, Rahman, Noor, Akhtaruzzaman, & Hughes, 2006; Leroy, Ruel, Sununtnasuk, & Ahmed, 2018; Nguyen et al, 2018). However, it should be noted that EARs in the current study are adopted from IOM, and may not necessarily reflect actual requirements, and serve only to assess the relative risk.…”