Evaluation of university students' attitudes together healthy nutrition: A Medical Faculty example

The universe of this cross-sectional study; Fırat University Faculty of Medicine students consisted of 554 people. A questionnaire including questions about sociodemographic characteristics and HEAS was administered. The compatibility of the scale scores with the normal distribution was performed using the Kolmogorov Smirnov test, median (minimum-maximum) values for data that did not fit the normal distribution, Man Whitney U test, Kruskal Wallis analysis of variance and Chi-Square test were done. P<0.05 was accepted for statistical significance. 58.12% of the 554 students participating in the research are female students. According to the HEAS total score, 68.23% of the students got the high score and 12.63% got the ideal score. HEAS total score, father's illiteracy, broken family, less than two hours of use of social media, previous nutrition education, drinking eight glasses of water or more per day, skipping meals, and eating a fruit-vegetable diet was found significant and to be higher. In conclusion; According to the results of the research, the HEAS levels of the participants are in the ideal range, albeit slightly. In order to increase the attitudes of medical school students, who are the future community health leaders, about healthy nutrition, more nutrition and awareness training should be given and they should be supported to increase their HEAS levels to the ideal range. Keywords: Medical faculty, Attitude Scale for Healthy Nutrition, Healthy Eating, University Students, Attitude