A pilot study on obesity prevalence and health habits in Mexican college students

Abstract

Obesity is one of the greater health problems the present society must to face with, to such an extent to be considered a pandemic. Regardless of its universality, certain social and/or ethnic groups are more directly affected. Among them, the people of Mexican origin hold an important place, in spite of which, there are very few studies carry out with clearly Mexican origin samples. This paper use a 505 university students sample, about 20,83 years old mean age. With the help of a questionnaire, we obtained information about body mass index and other behaviours linked with health, such as tobacco consumption, alcohol consumption and physical activity. The results show that there were significant differences between sexes, with men implementing more risk behaviours than women (except for a greater amount of physical activity.) In addition, it seems to be an important relation between alcohol consumption and smoking. Broader studies, with bigger samples are necessary to contrast these results.