A Review of Applying Healthy Dietary Nutrition Knowledge in Tertiary Education Setting

Abstract

© 2020 IEEE. The review of a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study pointed out that the relationship between dietary habits and a Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) has been extensively investigated, and China's dietary structure is no better than the U.S. It indicates a tight connection between the dietary structure and overall physical health of people. Moreover, there is a dietary structure unbalanced problem existed among university students. However, there is a gap in understanding of nutrition knowledge. Thus, it is especially important for university students to understand how to better apply healthy nutrition knowledge to their daily diet. Therefore, this study aims to identify the key concepts and key factors that influence their dietary structure, basic nutrition knowledge, and lifestyle. Moreover, the key concepts and key factors bring together to develop a conceptual model. This conceptual model will later be used to help university students to better apply healthy dietary nutrition knowledge to their diet and healthy life. Five major databases were searched for randomized controlled trials and other nonexperimental studies from 2001 to 2015 that were conducted in the tertiary education settings (i.e., colleges and universities). This literature review suggests that with a variety of interventions, the dietary behavior and knowledge could be improved, but more research is required to examine the effectiveness of a specific intervention among different groups of people, particularly from the developed countries and developing countries.