College Students’ Views on Functional, Interactive and Critical Nutrition Literacy: A Qualitative Study
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Setting, Recruitment and Participants
2.2. Moderator Guide Development
2.3. Procedure
2.4. Analysis
3. Results
3.1. Participant Demographics
3.2. Qualitative Results
3.2.1. Defining Nutrition Literacy in Their Own Words
3.2.2. Focus Group Themes
3.2.3. Functional Nutrition Literacy
“I guess for me I’d just say, ‘eat stuff that doesn’t make your body feel bad’. I don’t eat as much sugar as I used to. Not so much ‘cause I’m worried about my weight, or my health in the future, but because after I eat a lot of sugar I just feel kind of crappy and I don’t like that.”
“If I eat something, I try to just notice how I feel after I eat it. If I eat something and it makes me feel kind of crappy and heavy and like my head’s in a fog, I just try not to eat it again.”
“I don’t go and research food really and try to figure out what is healthy because I feel like it’s pretty secure in my mind—or I can just like use common sense to figure out if something is going to be healthy or not.”
“I feel like, generally it’s pretty common knowledge. [...] I feel like it’s—as far as when it comes to food and stuff there’s not that much left to debate.”
“I think people really count their calories, some of them, who don’t really know about nutrition and stuff like carbs or whatever, just say whatever has the least amount of calories should be the healthiest for you.”
“I really like to know approximately how many calories I am getting, because if I’m doing weightlifting and stuff like that, I don’t want to be pushing my muscles to the point where they’re not getting enough nutrition or I’m not eating enough. So, I like to get at least a little bit of a general idea of what I’m intaking and what I’m outputting.”
3.2.4. Interactive Nutrition Literacy
“The whole communal college student bonding rituals, which almost always involve either drinking, which entails a lot of calories, or eating, which also entails a lot of calories… you can cut yourself out of that particular social circle or you can just sort of shrug your shoulders and be like, ‘Okay, whatever, I’ll make up for it when I’m 40.’”
“Being super busy and prioritizing your grades and classes over your health could also have an effect too. If you get home and you don’t feel like cooking something healthy, it’s really easy to just have something that’s really not good for you. And I think that can lead to a decline in your mental health and your physical health and ultimately it will probably just hurt you more in the end.”
“I kind of make food choices off of convenience rather than actual healthy food or something that I want to eat. I don’t have a stove, so I put mozzarella sticks in the microwave for a couple minutes and done. But it’s more of a convenience.”
“I think [not] having a kitchen is a very big part of it for me just now because I don’t have as much control over the food I eat. I feel like I tend to make a lot worse choices.”
“I eat cheaper food now. I need to find ways to make things last longer so I get cheese that’s wrapped in packages and stuff like that.”
“Vegetables tend to be more expensive than meat. So, you wouldn’t buy the vegetables because when you’re a college student, you want to save as much money as you can.”
“It’s the same with fad diets. [...] Chipotle, you can walk in and order like specific things like a keto diet bowl and they’ll have set ingredients that go into it, or paleo, or vegan or anything based off of a diet. As fad diets are becoming more popular, they try to sell you on them.”
“The market is so flooded that when you have the super diet websites that are putting out crazy untested ridiculous [...] they will be like ‘oh you should have a fruit smoothie every morning or like 3 times a day’. It’s still not balanced and doesn’t make any sense.”
“They’re coming out with trend diets that are high fat diets and you can’t eat high fat and high carbs, so like, you have to be aware of what you’re eating.”
3.2.5. Critical Nutrition Literacy
“You can watch documentaries that are against stuff and it’s so biased because that’s what they want you to think, it’s bad to eat something.”
“You can find thousands of different results on the internet for something with the same question. So, the only way to really know what you’re going to be looking at is to kind of do an analysis of all the research that you’re seeing and cross reference it and look at how they did it. […] Either way that takes a lot of time and energy. And I feel like for a lot of people, they just kind of look at whatever’s going on TV and are like, ‘Wow, that sounds great!’”
“I would Google anything just to find out what the right thing to do is [...] or at least figure out if I should go see a nutritionist.”
“I’m just hopeful. I go based off of what comes up first. And if it’s at the top of the results I’m kind of just going to assume that’s more credible.”
“I wonder if there’s something we could do, like a gym buddy system we could just set up as students. You know? Like, I don’t know, make some sort of an online sign-up sheet where people go to the gym in pairs? Like, I’d love to do something like that.”
“People listening! You would have to get a lot of people to just like not pay for a dining plan and then they would be like, ‘why are we losing money, like why aren’t people paying for a dining plan?’”
“I don’t think the group collective is strong enough right now. Everyone has their own individual thoughts but we haven’t collectively put them together and organized them.”
“I’ve been wondering about it because yeah, how could this information—how could everybody get this information out there. The majority of processed foods are really awful for us and how does this information get out, I’m not sure, but it seems like nutrition is the leading cause of all mental and physical health problems in America. There’s more studies coming out about it, how do we get people to stop ignoring what we know? Not just with food, but in all sorts of things. I don’t know.”
4. Discussion
5. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Domain | Themes | Supporting Quotes |
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Functional | Food enhances or inhibits good health |
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Components of a healthy diet |
| |
Interactive | Navigating the college food environment |
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Awareness of food marketing on dietary behavior |
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Critical | Critical appraisal of nutrition information |
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Awareness of societal barriers to good health |
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McNamara, J.; Mena, N.Z.; Neptune, L.; Parsons, K. College Students’ Views on Functional, Interactive and Critical Nutrition Literacy: A Qualitative Study. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 1124. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18031124
McNamara J, Mena NZ, Neptune L, Parsons K. College Students’ Views on Functional, Interactive and Critical Nutrition Literacy: A Qualitative Study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2021; 18(3):1124. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18031124
Chicago/Turabian StyleMcNamara, Jade, Noereem Z. Mena, Leigh Neptune, and Kayla Parsons. 2021. "College Students’ Views on Functional, Interactive and Critical Nutrition Literacy: A Qualitative Study" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 3: 1124. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18031124