Survey on Body Mass Index (BMI) and eating habits among student at University Malaysia Kelantan in Jeli Campus

In the past year Malaysia has been experiencing a nutritional transition in food choices. As a consequence, the dietary habits of young adults have been affected, thus overweight and obesity are increasingly observed among the young. The purpose of this study is to assess the prevalence of overweight and obesity on a sample of students from University Malaysia Kelantan (Jell} as implied from their BMI, to investigate the eating habits among the students and finally, to investigate the correlation between the BMI and their eating habits. There are of 297 respondent involved in this study involving male and female of undergraduate student that have been chosen randomly during October until the end of November 2019. Students were asked to fill out a self-reported questionnaire that included questions on their eating habits, drinking and smoking habits. Also, body mass index was measured. Body mass index (BMI) is used to assess student's weight status. Statistical analyses like descriptive analysis and Chi Square test were performed using the Statistical Package for Social Science software (version 20.0) to analyse the respondents' basic information and to determine overweight and obesity among students and to categorize their eating habits. The result showed that 19.5% of the students were overweight, 6.1% were obese, while 58.6% were of normal weight and 15.8% were underweight. In addition, this study found that, the P-value of the chi-square test were greater than 0.05 hence there was not conclusive evidence of a statistical significant relationship between the BMI of students at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (Jeli Campus) and their eating habits with all of variables in eating habits except for item 'How often you overeating'. There was a relationship between body mass index and overeating in the current study, with a significant difference between categories in the studied sample (P=0.000). The significant value for this variable was less than 0.05 hence there is a conclusive evidence of a relationship between this eating habits and BMI. Therefore, this study is essential to advocate university's student to eat healthy by improving their eating habits and helping private sector or government sector especially Health Ministry in establishing diet-health education programs or promoting healthy dietary and weight management practices either to control or prevent overweight and obesity among the university's student while taking into consideration on the dietary and lifestyle factors, social or even cultural.