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Studie zur Ernährung von Studentinnen
Teil II: Wie ernähren sich Studentinnen in Deutschland?

Aim: To date very little is known about the nutrition habits of university students in Germany. Is the diet of the German student really as unhealthy as the media tell us? And e.g. how do the nutrition habits and food consumption of female university students in Germany differ from those of their contemporaries who are not studying? To answer these questions was one of the aims of our study “Women – University – Career. Nutrition?” We sought information not only about the career ambitions of female German students but, in this context, also about their nutrition habits. In part I of the study we established the proportions of underweight, normal weight and overweight female university students and discussed some aspects of their eating habits. It is the aim of this part of the study to see how often these students eat what kind of food.
Method: As part of our empirical study carried out at the end of 2007 we developed a questionnaire and sent it by e-mail to all 1044 female students of Furtwangen University, Germany. 265 students (25.4 %) sent the filled-in questionnaire back to us. The nutrition and food questions discussed here were closed-ended questions.
Results: Nutrition habits show an astonishingly high proportion of students eating wholefood diets. Also about 30 % of the students often eat so-called organic food. More than half of the students eat fruit at least once a day, similar was the frequency of consumption of vegetables and salad. Only 6.2 % of the students were vegetarians. Most of the nonvegetarians ate meat and/or sausage at least two or three times a week. They rarely ate fast food, but had an astonishingly high level of consumption of sweets and snacks. Surprisingly, the amount of sweets consumed was higher in the group of underweight students than in the group of students in the normal weight range.
Conclusions: These data reveal quite a highlevel of interest in healthy nutrition among the female students surveyed, and agree with the results of former studies which showed that women, especially well educated women, make an effort to eat healthily. But their frequent consumption of fruit and vegetables and their avoidance of fast-food is in contrast to their high level of sweet consumption. We are not sure whether this above-average consumption of sweets and snacks is only an expression of female nutritional preferences or e.g. is a reaction to the increased stress at university today. With regard to their future jobs it would be sensible to inform all students about the importance of nutrition for efficiency and fitness and about the potential bio-psychosocial inter-relationships with working life and career.

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