First-Year College Students Increase Food Label–Reading Behaviors and Improve Food Choices in a Personal Nutrition Seminar Course

"It is really just brilliant to get credits for something that is so important to you!" Skills for Life: University students' perceptions of a planned dietary life skills course

OBJECTIVE

Universities have a role in educating and empowering students to become healthy and literate citizens of the 21st century society. The aim of this study was to explore university students' perceptions regarding the relevance and utility of a planned dietary life skills course.

DESIGN

Qualitative design including focus group discussions.

SETTING

A Norwegian university with participating undergraduate students from seven different disciplines.

METHOD

Data collection included 13 semi-structured focus group discussions involving 57 university students (35 women and 22 men aged 18-38 years). The focus group discussions were recorded and transcribed verbatim. To ensure in-depth knowledge of the research participants' thoughts and reflections, thematic analysis strategy was undertaken by a team of researchers.

RESULTS

When presented to the idea of a dietary life skills course as a university course, the students were mostly positive regarding its relevance and utility, however both motivators and barriers for attending were put forward. Some mentioned potential academic course benefits, such as enhanced CV, and a few mentioned potential societal benefits such as a healthy population and sustainable food consumption. Several motivators for attending the course were launched, such as increased knowledge and cooking skills, having dinner and expanded network. The students wanted to learn about food, nutrients and health, and how to cook simple, affordable, healthy and sustainable meals. Potential barriers for attending were mostly related to practicalities, such as potential lack of alignment with ordinary study programme or too demanding lectures.

CONCLUSION

Most students acknowledged the value of a dietary life skills course and thought that such a course could benefit their personal life. This encourages the offering of such courses at university level, tailored to consider both motivators and barriers for attending.

Toward a Healthy and Environmentally Sustainable Campus Food Environment: A Scoping Review of Postsecondary Food Interventions

Interventions are urgently needed to transform the food system and shift population eating patterns toward those consistent with human health and environmental sustainability. Postsecondary campuses offer a naturalistic setting to trial interventions to improve the health of students and provide insight into interventions that could be scaled up in other settings. However, the current state of the evidence on interventions to support healthy and environmentally sustainable eating within postsecondary settings is not well understood. A scoping review of food- and nutrition-related interventions implemented and evaluated on postsecondary campuses was conducted to determine the extent to which they integrate considerations related to human health and/or environmental sustainability, as well as to synthesize the nature and effectiveness of interventions and to identify knowledge gaps in the literature. MEDLINE (via PubMed), CINAHL, Scopus, and ERIC were searched to identify articles describing naturalistic campus food interventions published in English from January 2015 to December 2019. Data were extracted from 38 peer-reviewed articles, representing 37 unique interventions, and synthesized according to policy domains within the World Cancer Research Foundation's NOURISHING framework. Most interventions were focused on supporting human health, whereas considerations related to environmental sustainability were minimal. Interventions to support human health primarily sought to increase nutrition knowledge or to make complementary shifts in food environments, such as through nutrition labeling at point of purchase. Interventions to support environmental sustainability often focused on reducing food waste and few emphasized consumption patterns with lower environmental impacts. The implementation of integrated approaches considering the complexity and interconnectivity of human and planetary health is needed. Such approaches must go beyond the individual to alter the structural determinants that shape our food system and eating patterns.

A Survey to Discover Current Food Choice Behaviors

Food choices are complex functions of several elements that could change over time. Nowadays consumers appear careful about sustainable food consumption: the behavior of “food citizenship”, as the practice to support a sustainable food system during the consumption actions, arises. This study aims to recognize the existence of food choice behaviors in the contemporary scenario and to investigate the relation between the food choice factors and the behaviors recognized. Following a quantitative research method, a sample of 380 participants, recruited from a traditional Italian food and wine event, completed a questionnaire in order to detect their attitude about food. Four current food choice behaviors were recognized: The Individualist, The Foodie, The Environmentalist and The Health enthusiast. The relation between food choice factors and food choice behaviors was explained. Several stakeholders could benefit from the study results, in order to better understand how to adapt products and marketing strategies to satisfy the emerging customer’s needs and awareness. Even if a person can identify themselves within a single food choice behavior, they become aware of other choice models expanding their personal point of view. Finally, new research scenarios arose for the researchers.

Using Food Models to Enhance Sugar Literacy among Older Adolescents: Evaluation of a Brief Experiential Nutrition Education Intervention

Adolescent diets high in sugar are a public health concern. Sugar literacy interventions have changed intake but focused more on children, adults, and early adolescents and on sugar sweetened beverages rather than total sugar consumption. Food models are an efficacious experiential learning strategy with children. This study assessed the impact of two 45 min nutrition lessons using food models on adolescents’ sugar literacy. Classes (n = 16) were randomized to intervention or control with knowledge, label reading skills, intentions to limit sugar consumption measured at baseline and follow-up. Two hundred and three students aged 14 to 19 from six schools on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada participated in the study. Adolescents’ knowledge of added sugar in foods and beverages and servings per food group in a healthy diet was limited at baseline but improved significantly in the intervention condition (F(1, 201) = 104.84, p < 0.001) compared to controls. Intention to consume less added sugar increased significantly after intervention (F(1, 201) = 4.93, p = 0.03) as did label reading confidence (F(1, 200) = 14.94, p < 0.001). A brief experiential learning intervention using food models was efficacious for changing student’s knowledge about sugar guidelines and sugar in food, label reading confidence, and intention to change sugar consumption.