Assessment of Knowledge and Attitude of Medical Students Towards Nutrition and Health: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Students' health and well-being generally depend on their nutritional intake. Medical students, in particular, must be physically and mentally fit to perform better academically and to treat their patients holistically. Consuming a nutritious diet and maintaining good health requires an adequate understanding of nutrition and related diseases. Thus, this study used a validated general nutrition knowledge questionnaire to evaluate nutritional knowledge and aimed to assess medical students' knowledge and attitudes about health and nutrition-related diseases. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 123 medical students between July 2023 and June 2024. A general nutrition knowledge questionnaire was used for the online survey, which consisted of questions on nutrition knowledge, individual dietary choices, thoughts about expert advice and awareness about health problems and diseases related to weight management and diet. The responses obtained were put in an Excel (Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA) spreadsheet, and the data obtained was transformed into bar graphs and pie charts by using SPSS version 20 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). For the statistical analysis of data, percentages were calculated. Results: The mean age of the study participants was 18.56 +/- 1.16 years. The gender-wise distribution of participants shows around 47.7% (50) male and 57.3% (66) female. 39.8% of students answered correctly the precise requirement of macronutrients. 21.1% of students were unsure about the content of added sugar, salt and fibre requirements. The majority of students made healthy dietary choices, while many students were unaware of the expert's advice and diet-related diseases. Conclusion: It was discovered in the current study that students' general understanding of a nutritious diet was good, but they lacked knowledge regarding the nutrient content. Students showed a sufficient level of understanding of the healthy food selections, but they were not aware of the healthy cooking methods. Students were unaware of the advice given to the patients, while awareness of nutrition-related diseases was acceptable. Inadequate understanding and lack of awareness are attributed to the limited nutrition-related curriculum in medical schools.