Healthy lifestyle behaviors of university students and related factors

Objective: This study was conducted to determine healthy lifestyle behaviors of university students and related factors. Methods: Designed to use the descriptive and stratified sampling method, the study included 2100 students studying in the departments of Health Sciences, Science, Social Sciences, and Educational Sciences at Sakarya University, Turkey. The study was conducted between May 2015 and December 2015. Data including socio-demographic characteristics and Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP II) were collected. The Mann Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and Spearman's rank correlation were used for data analysis. Results: The median score of the students on the HLBS II was 2.42 and for the sub-dimensions, the median score was 2.22 for the health responsibility (HR), 2.12 for physical activity (PA), 2.22 for nutrition (N), 2.77 for spiritual development (SD), 2.77 for interpersonal relationships (IR), and 2.37 for stress management (SM). It was observed that gender, age, income, grade level, smoking, nutritional habits, body mass index, attending courses related to health effect healthy lifestyle behaviors. Conclusion: It was observed that students showed the least responsible behaviors with regards to physical activity, health responsibility, and nutritional habits. In order to protect and improve the health of students, it may be useful to make health promotion courses compulsory in the curriculum of all departments in the university.