Evaluation of eating behaviors and body composition among university students

The aim of this study is to evaluate the eating attitudes of university students according to their body composition and some demographic variables. The sample of the study consisted of 364 university students, 181 female and 183 male, studying at Selçuk University Faculty of Sports Sciences in the 2024-2025 academic year. For this study, the decision of the Non-Interventional Ethics Committee of Selçuk University Faculty of Sports Sciences was taken and the participants were asked to fill out the voluntary consent form stating that they participated in the study voluntarily. The study was carried out based on the survey model. The personal information form prepared by the researcher and the Eating Attitudes Test-26 forms developed by Garner et al. (1982) and adapted to Turkish by Ergürey Okumuş and Sertel Berk (2020) to determine the eating attitudes of individuals were applied to the participants by face-to-face interview method outside of class hours after the necessary explanations were made. In addition, the body composition components of the participants were determined with the Tanita BC 545 device. The data obtained from the research were analyzed using the SPSS 29.0 package program. Since the normal distribution assumption was not provided in the analysis of the data, non-parametric tests were used in the statistical evaluation of the data. For this purpose, the Mann Whitney U test was used for two groups in the comparison of quantitative data; the Kruskal Wallis H test was used for more than two groups. Post hoc multiple comparisons were made in determining the different group for the Kruskal Wallis H test. The significance level in the study was accepted as 0.05. As a result of the analysis; It was determined that 90.6% of the women had normal, 9.4% had abnormal, and 88.5% of the men had normal and 11.5% had abnormal eating attitude levels according to the eating attitude scale cut-off values of the individuals participating in our study. In addition, while no significant difference was found in body compositions according to the gender variable and the cut-off values of the eating attitude scale, statistically significant results were obtained in the eating attitude test sub-dimensions according to age, exercise status, daily main and snack numbers, daily water consumption, appearance perception and healthy nutrition perception. As a result, it can be said that regular exercise and healthy eating habits gained in childhood positively affect the eating attitude behaviors and body compositions of especially university-age young adults.