78% college students in Chennai lead unhealthy lifestyle, finds study

The study conducted by the Department of Community Medicine at the Government Stanley Medical College covered 483 undergraduate students from across colleges in Chennai, in the age group between 17 and 20 years. 

A whopping 78% of the students had unhealthy lifestyle habits and all the participants had at least one risk factor. The awareness on the risk factors was ignificantly less among non-professional students, but they had significantly better behavioural habits than the professional ones, the study stated. 

The risk factors strongly related to the development of lifestyle diseases were defined as unhealthy dietary intake- less than seven times of fruits and / or vegetable, skipping breakfast, intake of junk foods and soft drinks in the last one week, physical inactivity, current smoking habits and alcohol consumption. The study also showed that a quarter of the sample skipping breakfast and poor vegetable and fruit intake belongs to those living in hostels.

Talking to DTNext, Dr Evangeline Mary, Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, said that with increasing rates of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, hypertension and obesity, there is an urgent need to motivate students to switch to healthier practices. 

“When we undertook the study, we didn’t expect such poor results. If we want to combat the growth of NCDs, we need to focus on the adolescents. The students need to be motivated to follow healthier practises with diet and lifestyle. We approached the college authorities to create awareness and help them make better choices,” Dr Evangeline said. 

Experts also suggest that there should be a government backed initiative to intervene and implement a programme for healthy lifestyle at a young age. Dr J Dhivyalakshmi, paediatric endocrinologist, Sri Ramachandra University, said, “There are community centres in the West who educate students in schools. We don’t have such initiatives here. To be effective, any programme for advocating nutrition and health related concepts should be backed by the government.”

The study was published in the April issue of International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health.