Lifestyle practices among medical students: An observational study

It is well established that a healthy lifestyle helps in preventing diseases and promotion of well-being. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors particularly poor dietary practices, physical inactivity, stress and smoking are major risk factors for conditions like overweight, obesity and non-communicable diseases. In spite of these chronic complications related to the unhealthy life style, studies focusing on prevalence of unhealthy habits, level of its awareness, health hazards and strategies to prevent and control unhealthy life style among students are very limited in the literature. Assessing the level of awareness of the healthy life style practice would be beneficial to plan necessary educational intervention to the population. The objectives of the present study were to obtain the body mass index (BMI) and level of life style practices among the undergraduate medical students. The understanding of the level of spiritual growth, interpersonal relations, nutrition, physical activity, health responsibility and stress management in the study population was also obtained. 226 undergraduate medical students (101 males and 125 females) participated in the study. Health promoting lifestyle profile (HPLP II) developed by Walker et al., 1995 was used for the data collection. The height, weight and waist-hip ratio were also measured. BMI of the study population ranged from 17.20 to 40.06 kg/m2. A total of 62 (27.4%) were overweight and 26 (11.5%) were obese based on BMI. The sum of the score was calculated and the status of the health promoting behavior was categorized as moderate (110, 48.7%), good (111, 49.1%) and excellent (5, 2.2%). The present study would help to obtain the level of life style practices among the medical students. It would help to plan an appropriate intervention to increase the level of healthy life style practices and to encourage them to do physical activities and follow the balanced diet.