Factors Influencing Eating Habits among Wellness Students at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan

Abstract

Nowadays a person's eating habits are influenced by a number of specific factors. It can happen either in positive or negative and problems occur if eating habits are not taken care of properly and bring harm to an individual. The study aims to investigate the factors that influence the eating habits among third year of Wellness students at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK). A total of 123 respondents from third year Wellness students were surveyed based on a quantitative research design using questionnaire. The study performs the Pearson correlation analysis to see the relationships among variables and modeled the Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) to test the hypothesis in order to find the factors that influence the eating habits. The study found that physical factor (r = 0.472), psychological factor (r = 0.567) and food consumption trend (r = 0.624) have moderate positive significant relationship with eating habits since all the p-value is less than 0.05. However, results of MLR obtain that only two variables were significant influences on eating habits which are psychological (p-value < 0.05) and food consumption trend (p-value < 0.05). While, there is no significant influence of physical factors on eating habits among third year Wellness students at UMK (p-value > 0.05). Factor that most influence eating habits is food consumption trend (B = 0.338). The implication of the study is to make the community aware of the importance of maintaining healthy eating habits and to adopt healthy eating habits regardless of the circumstances. Healthy eating habits can prevent chronic diseases.