BACKGROUND: It is well known that adherence to the Mediterranean Diet (MD) is decreasing and this has been related to the rise in non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs).
The University population (employees and students) has been indicated as being at risk of adopting an unhealthy lifestyle (due to the evolution towards sedentarism or by contrast to a hectic lifestyle) and of developing NCDs as a consequence. AIMS of the proposed study is
2. to evaluate the efficacy of nutritional counselling in increasing adherence to the Mediterranean diet, increasing health benefit and inflammatory, metabolic and oxidative stress biomarkers, anthropometric measures, adherence to the MD and food purchase habits will be analyzed at the beginning and at the end of the intervention.
METHODS:
Participants will be recruited among the Sapienza population (students, teachers, and employees) with low adherence to the MD and/or lacking nutritional literacy. Two subgroups will be formed: one will receive standard nutritional advice based on the Guidelines for healthy Italian food habits; a second group will receive multidisciplinary health counselling that includes both nutritional advice and psychological health coaching. Inflammatory, metabolic and oxidative stress biomarkers, anthropometric measures, adherence to the MD, and food purchase habits will be analyzed at the beginning and at the end of the intervention.
EXPECTED RESULTS: Both interventions are supposed to improve nutritional status, anxiety around food and food-related thoughts, food purchase habits, and inflammatory profile, but we hypothesize that the health counseling group will record the bigger improvement.
Italy is witnessing a gradual drifting from the MD towards a Westernised diet. Despite the improvement in health care and the increase in life expectancy, the lower adherence to MD may represent a risk for the potential rising of NCDs incidence and prevalence, and the related worsening of the quality of life. This will bring a significant and unsustainable increase in direct and indirect health and social costs.
On the contrary, solid and growing scientific evidence supports the role of a healthy lifestyle to preserve health, promote individual and social well-being, to avoid the occurrence of NCDs. Moreover, the actual unhealthy lifestyle increases the nutritional vulnerability in the general population and/or in categories of subjects exposed to specific stressors (e.g. University students). As assessed by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) observation ¿vulnerability is sensitive to context, and individuals may be vulnerable in one situation but not in another¿.
Vulnerability can predispose to maladaptive coping behaviors, to unaware and uninformed adhesion to fake eating and/or too eccentric social models, to unhealthy purchase habits, to the acceptance of unrealistic body image models, possibly leading to eating disorders, and/or to addictive behaviors.
Finally, it is well known that the acquisition/recovery of a healthy lifestyle is much more achievable and appropriate at a young age since the improvement of an unhealthy lifestyle in later life or in individuals suffering from chronic degenerative diseases is unlikely and unrealistic.
A few studies have investigated the vulnerability of University students (and employees) and, to the best of our knowledge, they never looked to metabolic, lifestyle, psychological and social aspects at the same time. A multidimensional, comprehensive evaluation of vulnerability, starting with the analysis of the nutritional status (considering eating and physical activity habits, body composition, energy and nutrient balance, purchase habits, mental health, and psychological wellbeing), may give important information to increase the knowledge on this problem and to shed light upon better management of it.
Statistical analysis will be conducted for identifying a combination of variables that are easy to measure and predictive of high nutritional, physiological, and psychological maladjustment, and that may be used in the future for assessing nutritional vulnerability in a University student population.
Sapienza University population represents a very important setting (it¿s one of the biggest Universities in Europe) for documenting the impact of nutritional vulnerability on health status and to verify the efficacy of health coaching based on validate literature. The analysis of sustainability and transferability of the results on the adult population of Sapienza may represent an additional strength of the study.
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