Investigation on college students' nutritional knowledge-attitude-practice and evaluation on their dietary status

Objective: To explore the nutritional knowledge-attitude-practice(KAP) status and dietary structure among college students for improvement of their nutritional health. Methods: Self-designed questionnaires were distributed to 1 373 college students which were selected by cluster sampling from Bengbu Medical College randomly to investigate their nutritional KAP status. Results: There were significant differences between students with different nutritional KAP scores in age, sex, grade, monthly food consumption and body mass index(BMI)(P<0.05 to P<0.01). There were significant differences between students with different nutritional knowledge scores in age, sex, grade and area(P<0.01). Logistic regression analysis showed that the scores of nutritional KAP were related to sex and grade(P<0.01), excluding the confounding factors, the results showed that nutritional KAP scores of girls and high grade's students were 1.882 and 2.402 times of boys and low grade's students. Conclusions: Students in our school have low knowledge of nutritional information, especially the source and role of some common nutrients. But most of them have the active attitude, so the effective nutritional education should be performed to improve their nutritional level, then to improve the physical and mental development in college students.