The Association between Eating Habits and Body Mass Index among Nursing Students

A cross-sectional study on BMI and eating habits among students in a medical college in Kerala

“…Similar findings were reported by other studies in Medinipur, India, Cameroon, Romania and Serbia. 8,11,13,16 But, contrary to our study findings, higher prevalence estimates have been reported in the India, Egypt, USA, and Saudi Arabia. 7,[9][10][11]15,16 These differences could be as a result of socio-cultural disparities, which may affect the lifestyle, food habits and health behavior of the students, differences in sampling techniques, sample sizes of studies and to some extent on how the data were collected.…”

“…This is similar to other studies done in India and various other countries mainly among students, where the sample size ranges from 300 to 600. 7,10,11,15,16 While some studies had a larger sample size(>1000); few other studies had a smaller sample size than present study(<200). 8,9,[12][13][14]17,18 Female students were more in number compared to males, which is similar to most other studies.…”

“…8,9,[12][13][14]17,18 Female students were more in number compared to males, which is similar to most other studies. [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] But some studies had more male students than females. [7][8][9] While another study conducted in Saudi Arabia had only male students as study subjects.…”

“…7,14,17 Also, higher prevalence estimates have been reported in the Mangalore, India, 9 while few other studies in Alexandria, Egypt, Benha, Egypt, Cameroon, USA and Saudi Arabia have reported lower estimates. [10][11][12]15,16 Overweight and Obese students were 18.2% and 2.1% respectively. Male students were found to be having more overweight (27.8%) and obesity (2.3%) compared to female students with overweight (12.9%) and obesity (1.9%) respectively.…”

“…This is similar to most of the studies, except for the studies in Benha, Egypt and Cameroon where even though males were more obese; females were found to be more overweight than males. 7,8,[10][11][12]14,15,17,18 The lower rate of obesity among female students is expected since females are more cautious about their weight status than males, due to society perceptions which encourage females to be slender. This assumption was supported by the fact that only 5.8% of males were underweight as compared to 14.2% of females in this studied sample.…”