Diet quality and associated factors in Brazilian Undergraduates during the Covid-19 pandemic: results of the BRAZUCA-covid multicenter study
Multicenter Study, Healthy Eating, Perceived Stress, Food Insecurity, SARS-CoV-2
Upon entering university, young people face several transformations that affect their lifestyle. Therefore, the stress associated with this period can influence the adoption of lifestyle habits that are not always appropriate. And one of the most significant changes is related to the quality of food. Furthermore, during the COVID-19 pandemic period and changes in students' lifestyles with the transition to remote learning and social distancing, may have caused changes in students' eating habits. Thus, assessing diet quality represents a crucial strategy to obtain information that can support the formulation of public health policies, especially in a health emergency context, as it enables the analysis of the different elements that make up the eating patterns of people. individuals. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the association between the quality of the diet of university students and sociodemographic characteristics, nutritional status, food insecurity, sleep duration and perceived stress in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. A descriptive, observational and cross-sectional study was carried out, with data collected between August 2020 and February 2021, through an online form, with undergraduate students from five Brazilian universities, covering the five regions of Brazil. The questionnaire was a compilation of socioeconomic variables (including race, family income and income change during the pandemic) and validated tools, such as the Diet Quality Scale, Brazilian Food Insecurity Scale, Perceived Stress Scale and sleep duration, totaling 108 questions. 4732 students participated in the research, with a median age of 22 years old, 66.1% of whom were female; 37.8% of students had some degree of food insecurity, and 74.3% had a perception of high stress. Regarding diet quality, 51.9% of students had good diet quality, however 8.6% and 1.3% of students had poor or very poor diet quality, respectively. We observed that there was an association between poor or very poor diet quality and weight gain during the pandemic, food insecurity and moderate and high perceived stress among university students. The study resulted in the article published in the journal “Frontiers in Nutrition” entitled “Diet quality and associated factors in Brazilian undergraduates during the COVID-19 pandemic”.