Publication:

Lifestyle, nutrition knowledge, body dissatisfaction, and nutritional status of IPB university students in Indonesia

Background Adolescents experience changes as a response to concerned behaviour about body shape, leading to a restricted diet in their food consumption. It is stated that 76.56% of male students and 82.87% of female students experienced body dissatisfaction. As a result, the students are developing negative eating behaviour despite having a normal nutritional status.

Methods This comparative cross-sectional study was conducted at IPB University dormitories. The study involved selecting samples using a systematic random sampling method. Total samples were 80 students.

Results A significant difference was found in the diversity of food consumption between male and female subject groups (p=0.038). This research also showed other significant differences found in consumption of green leafy vegetable group (p=0.013), fruits and vegetables source of vitamin A group (p=0.000), and meat and fish group (p=0.033) within the male and female subjects. The other significant differences were also found in the frequency of exercise (p=0.000) and in the level of physical activity (p=0.027) between male and female subject groups.  There was a significant correlation between nutritional knowledge and nutritional status of male (r=0.784, p=0.045) subjects, and correlation between body dissatisfaction and nutritional status of male (r=0.349, p=0.027) and of female (r=0.383, p=0.015) subjects.

Conclusions There was a significant relationship between nutritional knowledge and nutritional status in male subjects. Furthermore, there is a relationship between body dissatisfaction and the nutritional status of the subject, where subjects with more nutritional status tend to have higher body dissatisfaction scores.