EATING HABITS AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background Information The term Eating Habits can be define as what and how people eat, their selection of food, their way of getting food. In every part of world, there always an influence of environment, religion, economic and culture on eating habits of habitants. All human being eat food to survive. Food also produce immunity against disease. People eat to People eat according to the inherited indigenous. They always like to adopt etiquette learnt from their elders. They make food combinations as per local etiquettes. Etiquettes also changed according to the meal and events. This is almost very common to take three meals in a day. In general breakfast meal consist of lighter food as compare to lunch and dinner. There are several cooking recipes across the world, but in developed countries, most of the food contain grains, rice, noodles and in meat, fish, mutton, beef used. Factors Affecting Eating Habits There are many factors which determine a person what to eat. There is also some preference in addition to personal liking of food, for example cultural, religious, social and economical. Social Influence: Person living in a group of people must influenced by others. Its difficult for him/her to make personal choice every time. That Social influence forced a person to abide by local traditions. For example a person interested to take heavy meal in the lunch whereas co-partners prefer to take little food during work. He must have to follow and join them on their choice. Religion Influence: Religious obligations are always at top for every person living on any part of earth. Religious binding always bound a person to take food within the defined ranges of food. For Example for Jewish and Muslims pork is prohibited. In Christianity, some part of followers avoid to taking stimulating beverages whereas Catholics do not forbid it. Economic Influence: Eating habits developed by food which consumer is able to buy. In many parts of world economic situation direct the consumer what to buy and what to not. Therefore economic conditions may change and influence eating habits of habitant of that area.

Students eating habits on the other hand are not entirely affected by those influences mentioned earlier.Change in eating habits are a normal part of the transition to life on campus. Many students are used to having their meals prepared for them at home, but all of a sudden are exposed to cafeterias, new foods, eating as a social activity, and eating under stress. For many students the transition to student life will involve a small amount of weight gain. This may result from eating more than you used to and eating different foods For other students, eating can become more disordered in college, leading to weight loss or gain, binge eating and purging, or an unhealthy amount of time spent thinking about food. We chose eating habits as our research topic because it is a common problem among college students.

CHAPTER 2 METHODOLOGY 2.1 Respondents For sure our respondents were Penang Matriculation College students . Our research involved students of all modules and both genders. From approximately 2000 students we picked 150 students as our respondents. From the 150 students 75 were male students and 75 more were female students. 2.2 Instruments Our method of research or instruments that we used to aid us in our research are questionnaires. The contents of our questionnaire were 10 simple questions that will aid us in analysing the data. 2.3 Research Procedure

1.2 Objectives The main reason we carried out this research was to find out how eating habits affected PMC students mainly in academic terms. Hypothesis: 1. Most PMC students do not practise healthy eating habits 2. PMC students are not aware of the effects of bad eating habits in the long run 3. Academic performance of PMC students are affected by their eating habits 4. Research Questions: 1. Does the eating habits of PMC students affect their BMI ? 2. How does the eating habits of PMC students affect their academic performance ? 3. Do PMC students practise healthy eating habits ?