Students' Knowledge of Healthy Food and Their Actual Eating Habits: A Case Study on the University of Granada (Spain)
Identificadores
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10481/70020Metadata
Show full item recordAuthor
Entrena Durán, FranciscoEditorial
FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
Date
2021Referencia bibliográfica
Entrena-Durán F, Baldan-Lozano H and Valdera-Gil J-M (2021) Students’ Knowledge of Healthy Food and Their Actual Eating Habits: A Case Study on the University of Granada (Spain). Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 5:687574. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2021.687574
Abstract
This article focuses on an analysis of the discourses produced during 34 semi-structured
interviews (17 men and 17 women) conducted at the University of Granada (Spain)
with undergraduate, Master, and Ph.D. students. The interviewees were between 20
and 44 years old. It was observed that the fact of having a high educational level did
not prevent University students from eating unhealthily. There is a gap between the fact
that 97.1% of 34 students interviewed (that is, 33 of them) know what healthy food is
and their self-perception about whether or not what they are eating is healthy, since in
41.2% of them said self-perception is negative. This gap narrows as the interviewees’
age increases and their socio-economic and vital situation is stabilizing which favors that
their eating habits become more regular and healthier. Thus, all the interviewees aged
27 or over self-perceived that they were eating healthily. But the biggest differences are
those that have to do with the gender of interviewees. Thus, while 23.5% of women
interviewed perceived that they were not eating healthy, 76.5% of them felt that they were
eating healthy. However, among the men interviewed, these percentages were somehow
reversed, in such a way that 58.8% of them believed that they were not eating healthy,
compared to 41.2% of them who indicated that they were eating healthy. Therefore, the
investigation revealed that women tend to have the best chances of assuming healthy
eating habits. Male students living outside the family home or without female partners
exhibited greater feeding problems, while females living under similar conditions tended
to display healthier eating habits. This is related to the fact that women have traditionally
been in charge of acquiring and preparing food. So, women’s food education has not
been restricted to the mere transmission to them of knowledge about what healthy food
is, but from their childhood they were food trained through their active involvement
in practical experiences. Obviously, the solution proposed to this male disadvantage
is to not perpetuate macho gender stereotypes that assign women the role of home
caregivers, but to seek that both women and men have the opportunity and the duty to
experience equally those practical experiences that involve the tasks of the acquisition
and preparation of food. Working to achieve a situation like this, not only promotes
progress in gender equality, but also helps to overcome the lower training of men to
perform the tasks inherent in their diet.