Socioeconomic, demographic and lifestyle-related factors associated with unhealthy diet: a cross-sectional study of university students

Abstract

BackgroundFood habits are important to promote and maintain good health throughout life, and unhealthy diet is a modifiable and preventable risk factor. University students are a key group of adults among whom to promote healthy lifestyles. The aim of this study is to determine the factors associated with unhealthy diet in a sample of university students.MethodsAn electronic cross-sectional survey was conducted with university students (n=593) from inland Spain, during the 2016-2017 academic year. The survey collected information on the participants’ food habits using an annual food frequency questionnaire. We also collected socioeconomic and demographic data and lifestyle-related information. A multivariate logistic regression was used for analysis.ResultsThe multivariate logistic regression revealed that the factors associated with an unhealthy diet were: being male, being underweight compared to the reference category (normal weight), having a mother of low socioeconomic status, the family home not being in the university city and, finally, studying a non health-related courseConclusionAmong students of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, being male, being underweight, the family home not being in the university city, having a mother of low socioeconomic status, and, finally, not studying a health-related course are the factors associated with a lower quality diet. Following a healthy diet is key in reducing the health costs of non-communicable diseases, and ensuring an acceptable long-term quality of life in populations.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-018-6149-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Social determinants of food group consumption based on Mediterranean diet pyramid: A cross-sectional study of university students

“…The results of the second analysis indicate that gender is the social determinant with the largest effect on mean differences in food group consumption. Many works have shown that gender is associated with food habits [13,14,[16][17][18]52,54,58], and, as we indicated in the Introduction section, women usually exhibit better food habits than their male counterparts [13,14,[16][17][18]. In the case of male students, our study shows they have a higher intake of dairy products, olives, nuts and seeds, red meat and processed meat, sweets, eggs, alcoholic drinks and fast food.…”

“…Despite our results being partly inconsistent with other results in the previous literature on social determinants [9,67], they do coincide in the low adherence to Mediterranean diet and we have previously discussed the importance of this dietary pattern. In a previous work [14], 47.90% of students exhibited an unhealthy dietary pattern, which was equivalent to low adherence to Mediterranean diet, and the results of this new work and the earlier one coincide in the importance of developing healthy food habits among university students.…”

“…Students of Social Sciences show higher consumption of alcoholic drinks, supported by an article with similar results [65]. The lack of notable differences between the two student profiles (Health and Social Sciences) was unexpected, because a previous work found that studying a non-health related course was associated with an unhealthy diet [14]. This could be explained because that particular work used an index and not the overall consumption of food groups.…”

“…Table 1 shows the characteristics of the population by student gender. The students' age, whether they cooked (or not) for themselves, and the degree course were previously shown in our earlier work [14]. In the present study, we also included the location of the family home, but using three categories that consider the size of the family home town.…”

“…The final non-probabilistic sample comprised 593 participants (n = 593, 249 men and 344 women). Fig 1 shows the data cleaning process [14]. The information about sample, inclusion and exclusion criteria of participants may be reviewed in our previous work [14].…”