A study on the sources of information and perception of healthy diet among the National Youth Service Institute of Business Studies students, in Nairobi County, Kenya.
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Date
2013-06
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Publisher
Daystar University
Abstract
Past studies indicate that healthy diet communication aims to bring change to individual behaviours and social norms using some combination of media and interpersonal channels. However, these studies centre more on patient populations. The objective of this study was to find out the sources of information and perception of healthy diet among NYS IBS students in Nairobi County. The NYS IBS is composed of multicultural populations. At the NYS IBS, students are served with a diet that contains all the necessary food nutrients of proteins, vitamins, carbohydrates, minerals and fat. The study was guided by three objectives; to identify the sources students relied on for nutritional information; to examine the student’s perception of healthy diet and; to establish why students avoided mess food and opted for food from outside the mess. Data was collected from 158 respondents selected from a study population of 700 using systematic simple random sampling technique. Key results indicated that students relied on nutritional books (14.6%), magazines (9.5%), internet (8.9%), television (7.0%), health institutions (15.8%), nutritionists (11.4%), parents (17.1%), NYS administration (17.7%), relatives (1.9%), and peers (3.2%). The students understood the concept of healthy diet (82.9%), yet many of them skipped mess food. The students skipped mess food due to poor hygiene conditions at the mess (19.0%), limited food variety (19%), poor cooking (17.7%), serving cold foods (5.7%), inadequate ration (14.6%), and due to medical reasons (7.6%). AS a result the many respondents (50%) opted to consuming snacks. However, the snacks constituted of unhealthy diet. The study therefore recommended that information be availed to the students concerning practice of healthy diet eating. This will help avoid the discrepancy where students have knowledge of healthy diet but do not consume healthy diet.
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Keywords
Information Sources, Healthy diet, National Youth Service Institute of Business Studies, Nairobi County, Kenya.
Citation
A study on the sources of information and perception of healthy diet among the National Youth Service Institute of Business Studies students, in Nairobi County, Kenya. By Peter P. O. Sitima, Daystar Univerity, 2013.