The Effects of Nutrition Awareness and Knowledge on Health Habits and Performance Among Pharmacy Students in Egypt

Abstract

A cross-sectional study was conducted on a group of pharmacy students to assess the relation between nutritional knowledge and awareness of university students and their nutrition habits and health related performance and indicators. The students were subjected to a questionnaire designed to approach four health related topics including nutrition literacy, health awareness, nutritional habits and health related performance. Answers on each topic were collected and statistical analysis was performed using GraphPad Prism 5 software including a measure of gender differences and correlative studies. No significant difference between genders in the overall responses but discrepancies in certain questions were observed. Female students showed higher awareness of nutrition concepts and practices but poor implementation from their side was observed. The study revealed that a positive and significant correlation existed between health related performance and nutrition literacy (r = 0.32). Healthier eating habits and lifestyle were associated more with nutrition conscious students (r = 0.73) than knowledgeable students (r = 0.56). It was concluded that knowledge alone is not enough to stimulate individuals to practice healthy habits. Other implementations are required to raise awareness of the issues at hand.

Country and Gender-Specific Achievement of Healthy Nutrition and Physical Activity Guidelines: Latent Class Analysis of 6266 University Students in Egypt, Libya, and Palestine

“…In addition, it remains unclear whether the observed low healthy nutrition among our student population was due to lack of nutrition consciousness or lack of knowledge. For instance, among pharmacy students in Egypt, in terms of healthier eating habits and lifestyle, a higher correlation existed between the students’ health manifestations and knowledge ( r = 0.32) than consciousness ( r = 0.28) [ 31 ]. Likewise, in Libya since the late 1960s to early 2000s, the average calories available per individual per day have increased [ 32 ].…”

Towards the Implementation of a Conceptual Framework of Food and Nutrition Literacy: Providing Healthy Eating for the Population

“…The role of some antecedents and consequences discussed in the text was demonstrated by primary studies [25,[42][43][44][45]. The role of some antecedents and consequences discussed in the text was demonstrated by primary studies [25,[42][43][44][45]].…”

“…The literature showed an association between poor NL and lower education and socio-economic level [5,22,29,45,[52][53][54] according to different forms of literacy (i.e., health literacy) [55]. Finally, the authors of five papers discussed the role of age, gender, and health status as NL antecedents [5,14,22,42,54].…”

“…Analogously, twelve papers that discussed FL agreed that this dimension implied improved food and nutrition knowledge, and skills such as cooking [16,21,23,37,56,61,62,65,[70][71][72][73]. The authors of twenty-three papers also stated that the achievement of FL leads to a healthy diet, better food and physical activity choices, and healthy behaviors (i.e., eat more vegetables or fruits, consume less soda and sweetened beverages, engage in more physical activity, increase spice use and decrease salt use, decrease serving sizes including fast food, reduce frequency of consumption of packaged and processed snacks, increase purchasing of fresh foods, and increase use of food labels when selecting foods) [3,10,11,16,[20][21][22][23][24]39,40,42,56,57,59,61,62,67,68,[70][71][72][73][74].…”

“…Some studies discussed the relationship between NL and the quality of diet [5,28,33,34,42,53] and some other studies confirmed this association [25,44,45]. Some publications discussed health outcomes related to NL [45,52,75,76].…”