Abstract:
Eating healthy foods and living in a healthy life is one of the essential requirements for having long life expectancy. However, people are consuming fast foods with lots of calories but with little nutritional value that leads to chronic diseases like (NCDs) which was the major causes of morbidity and mortality in Maldives. This cross sectional descriptive study was carried out to identify knowledge, attitude and practices towards consumption of fast food among health background students of Maldives National University in May 2016. Among 100 participants who participated in the study, it has found that majority of participants were aware about the risks causes due to consumption of fast food. 45% of the participants have strongly agreed that fast food can causes NCDs and other diseases. Even though, participants have knowledge about the risk of consuming fast food, there were about 28% of participants who consume fast food every day while, 40% of the participants consume fast food weekly. Consumption of fast food among participants increases due to their lifestyle. As there 54% of the participants who agree that they prefer fast food when they want to become socialize with friends and family. In addition, 59% of the participants have strongly believed taste of the fast food makes to consume more fast food. Therefore, it can be said that the students have knowledge about risk factors of fast food consumption however; the attitudes and practices of students should be changed. Hence, the community should work on the policy of providing healthy meals conveniently at lower cost. Also the university should work on creating awareness among students to minimize intake of fast food and increase level of healthy foods to be consumed
