BACKGROUND: Healthy lifestyles, consisting of healthy eating habits and active lifestyle, are known to be protective factors promoting physical health and psychological wellbeing. University students may be considered a population at risk for unhealthy lifestyles due to factors like the evolution towards sedentarism, nutrition transition and high incidence of stressful situations (e.g. Cuijpers et al., 2018)
AIMS: 1) to analyse lifestyles habits, perceived stress and nutritional vulnerability of University students through a multidimensional and multidisciplinary approach; 2) To evaluate efficacy of a healthy life
style counselling intervention in promoting healthy lifestyles and wellbeing in Sapienza University students.
METHODS: the proposed research will be conducted in 2 phases:
Phase 1: cross-sectional study with 2 aims: a) evaluating, in first year course students, eating habits (in terms of adherence to the Mediterranean Diet, MD), physical activity, nutritional status, nutritional literacy, perceived stress, eating self-efficacy, , psychological wellbeing and the relationship between these variables; b) selecting students with high perceived stress and unhealthy lifestyles to admit to the following phase.
Phase 2: students will be admitted to a RCT study comparing a treatment-as-usual protocol (standard nutritional and exercise advice) to a health counselling protocol that add a health coaching to the standard protocol.
EXPECTED RESULTS: We expect that 1) sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy eating habits are assocated to higher BMI and lower nutritional literacy; 2) unhealthy eating habits are associated to greater perceived stress; 3) eating self-efficacy in the social and emotional domains mediate the relationship between perceived stress and unhealthy eating habits. We also expect that both interventions delivered in phase 2 improve nutritional status and physical activity but this improvement is significantly bigger in the health counselling group.
