Dietary intake and body composition in nutrition university students: a comparison between beginners and graduating
Abstract
University students, including Nutrition students, commonly have an unhealthy dietary pattern, which can harm their academic performance. Therefore, the objective was to compare the nutrient intake and body composition of beginners and graduating Nutrition students. This is a cross-sectional study, including students from a higher education institution. Weight, height, circumferences, and skinfolds were measured. For body composition, the 7-skinfold protocol of Jackson and Pollock (1978) was used for men and Jackson, Pollock, and Ward (1980) for women. For the dietary intake, three 24-hour recalls were applied on non-consecutive days and the average of these days was used in the analyses. 52 university students were included, 23 (44.2%) beginners and 29 (55.8%) graduating. The median age was 22 years old and 80.8% were women. There were no differences between graduating and beginners students for any anthropometric or body composition variable (p>0.05). Regarding energy consumption, 92.3% of students do not meet the daily recommendations, with no differences between the groups (p=0.398). There was also no difference between the groups in macronutrients intake. Graduating students had a higher consumption of fiber (p=0.013) and copper (p=0.011), with no difference for the other micronutrients. The majority of students (>50%) had consumption below the recommendations for fiber, calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, copper, selenium, in addition to vitamins A, B9, B1, B6, D and E. Thus, this study demonstrated low energy and micronutrient consumption in Nutrition students, but without significant differences when comparing beginners and graduating students.
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