Nutrition knowledge, attitude and practices of college's students of Payam Nour University of Golestan

This study designed for understanding the nutrition knowledge, attitude and practices of college’s students of Payam Nour University of Gourgan. The target population consisted entirely of college student of Payam Nour Universities. Standard questionnaire (K Parmenter and J Wardle 1999) which was developed to measure subject’s nutrition knowledge, attitude and practices distributed among 415 students randomly. After translation, questionnaires were evaluated by professor’s faculty of physical education and sport sciences. The reliability analysis yielded Cronbach Alpha values of 0.78 for the knowledge and 0.74 for the attitude scales. The collected data was analyzed by t-test, one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation coefficient (P<0.05). Results show that nutrition knowledge score in physical education student were highest and in business management student were lowest. ANOVA show that there were no significant differences among nutrition knowledge of all majors and between genders. Also nutrition attitude scores for business management were highest and for education science were lowest; but difference between nutrition attitudes among all majors was not significant. There were significant positive correlations between nutrition knowledge and attitude; and between nutrition attitude and practices of male and females students. According to our results, we suggest that student should more attention to nutrition. Also study in college as a golden period for learning, can affect on promote nutrition knowledge, attitude and practices of students, therefore the importance of nutrition in various college curriculums and improvement of the learning environment, related to nutrition need to be emphasized on college campuses.