Assessing the Role of Nutrition Awareness and Dietary Diversity on Academic Performance of University Students: A Survey based Regression Analysis

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to explore the impact of nutrition knowledge and dietary diversity on the academic performance of university students in Islamabad. The study is based on primary data from eight universities in Islamabad. 500 sample size is selected by two stage cluster sampling procedure. In the first stage, the primary sampling units is university and we select eight clusters from twenty three clusters by PPS cumulative total WOR procedure. From the selected eight clusters, 500 secondary sampling units (students) are select by proportional allocation in second stage. For the validity and checking the questionnaire, the pilot study is conducted by selecting 60 students. After cleaning of the collected data, Proportional Odds Model is estimated to conduct the econometric analysis about academic performance of university students in Islamabad. The study reveal that the Islamabad university students have average 50.5% students have awareness about nutrition knowledge. And the students more aware about the knowledge of classification there are 3.27% chances to increase the academic performance of students while the students more aware about the knowledge of diet- disease there are 2.1% chances to increase the academic performance of students and improvement in the awareness of knowledge of recommendation, can increase the chances 1.2% of students’ excellent academic performance. The more chances of excellent academic performance of those students have a high dietary diversity score compare to those students who have low dietary diversity scores. The study concludes that 0nutrition knowledge and dietary diversity have positive and significant impact on academic performance of university students in Islamabad.