Nutrition knowledge and healthy eating — are they connected?

College students are not known to be particularly health-conscious. The infamous “freshman 15” is a humorous, yet fairly accurate assessment of how some college students treat their physical well-being.

This attitude toward health pushed Maegan McNamara, a 29-year-old junior in the Decker School of Nursing from Coxsackie, N.Y., to examine the relationship between college students’ understanding of nutrition and their decision-making when it comes to health.

Throughout the spring 2018 semester, McNamara participated in the course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) under Lina Begdache in the HWS 410: Pathophysiology of Nutrition-Related Diseases class. McNamara and four other students focused their research on how college students’ knowledge of health and nutrition relates to their physical activity, dietary habits and sleep patterns.

“I wanted to understand if the nutritional knowledge students have impacts their health and diet,” McNamara says. “I wanted to know if particular groups of people are more health conscious than others. If they are healthier, is there a correlation between their knowledge and their health choices?”

Begdache, assistant professor of Health and Wellness Studies, believes the CURE approach is effective for students because it gives them the opportunity to build strong skills and relationships in a research setting.

“There are many benefits to the CURE approach,” Begdache says. “These include building a peer-peer relationship as well as faculty-student relationships [and] improving analytical and writing skills.”

“The CURE approach is interesting and allows for the application of concepts taught in the classroom into the research we are conducting,” McNamara adds.

McNamara’s team collected data through a survey titled, “Dietary Habits and Nutritional Knowledge Questionnaire.” They were interested in the differences in health consciousness between groups on campus, so the survey collected information on gender, age, type of student (such as current, transfer, etc.), Binghamton University school affiliation and extracurricular participation. The survey also included in-depth questions about dietary habits, nutritional knowledge, amount of exercise and sleep habits.

After the data-collection process was completed, McNamara and her group analyzed the data, looking for correlations between higher levels of nutritional knowledge and healthier lifestyle habits. They were also interested in learning if any groups are more health conscious than others and how that information can be used to improve other people’s health habits.

The team presented its findings to Begdache’s HWS 410 class on April 19 and to the entire University community during the student poster sessions on April 20 that were part of Binghamton Research Days.

One of the findings surprised the team. They hypothesized that Harpur College science students and Decker School nursing students would be more health conscious than students in other disciplines given their greater knowledge of nutrition and health; however, the results showed that students from the School of Management and the College of Community and Public Affairs had higher degrees of self-perceived health consciousness. Other correlations the team identified are that the males surveyed drink more carbonated beverages (considered less healthy) than the surveyed females do, and that the females ate significantly more fruits and vegetables (considered healthier) than their male counterparts.

Begdache says allowing students to pursue a research project they are interested in is what made McNamara’s project meaningful.

“Her research is important because she and her teammates developed the research question,” Begdache says. “Students were given a chance to come up with a research question they felt strongly about.”

For McNamara, who is married and has three children, doing this research and pursuing a nursing career was a natural path. After serving for two-and-a-half years in the U.S. Air Force as a Security Forces member (she left when she became pregnant with her second child), helping people became her priority.

“I served my country, and now I want to continue serving people through providing care and education as a nurse,” McNamara says.