Shane A. Snyder^1,, Angela Liegey Dougall¹

Health education courses provide an important setting for teaching nutrition. Common topics for health education have covered personal health barriers or behaviors such as factors related to a healthy diet, food safety, health beliefs, and fundamentals of proper nutrition in groups of people across the lifespan. The purpose of the current study was to assess what college-aged adults currently considered as interesting and important for dietary change to determine how nutrition education in higher education could be updated. For this study, 197 participants from across the U.S. and aged 18-23 participated in an online survey. They were asked about their demographic information, if they had any diets/restrictions, health conditions, and their interest and importance in 11 nutrition topics. We found participants ranked low cost healthy food options, and how diet relates to chronic disease as the more interesting and important topics. Additionally, having a food restriction or diet was related to ranking how diet relates to chronic disease as more interesting, r_s(170) = .31, p < .001, and was trending to be associated with ranking chronic disease as more important, r_s(170) = .24, p = .002. These results suggest that individuals with chronic health conditions may place more value in their diet to maintain or prevent health decline. Additionally, practical education of healthful low-cost foods and proper nutrition to mitigate disease are necessary to strengthen younger consumers’ nutrition knowledge and skills.

health, education, importance, nutrition, disease, college-aged