Topical Area: Community and Public Health Nutrition
Community and Public Health Nutrition (Poster Session)
(P24-064-23) Planetary Health Diet Consumption Is Associated With Eating Breakfast Regularly and Eating a Well-Balanced Diet in Japanese Male Undergraduates
Etsuko Kibayashi, MS, RD: No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.
Objectives: Few young Japanese adults regularly eat a well-balanced diet consisting of cereals (staple), proteins (main dish), and vegetables (side); this problem is coupled with poor breakfast habits. Recently, the planetary health diet has been recommended to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We hypothesized that recommending this diet might help to ameliorate the abovementioned dietary issues among young Japanese. We therefore examined the causal structure of the effects of planetary health diet consumption on regular breakfast and well-balanced diet intake in young men.
Methods: The subjects were 142 males among 222 engineering students completing a 2022 self-administered questionnaire (80.6% response rate) as part of a cross-sectional study at a public university in Hyogo Prefecture. A planetary health diet was defined by the consumption of eight items: chicken dishes, fish dishes, egg dishes, soybeans/soybean products, nuts, dairy foods, vegetable dishes, and fruit. We performed a covariance structure analysis by developing a hypothetical model using factors potentially associated with eating breakfast regularly and with eating a well-balanced diet at least twice daily.
Results: The results of the covariance structure analysis in this hypothetical model did not show acceptable goodness of fit. Therefore, acceptable goodness of fit was obtained by excluding chicken dishes and nuts from the eight items that comprised a planetary health diet (χ2 = 24.586, df = 19, GFI = 0.962, AGFI = 0.927, CFI = 0.975, RMSEA = 0.046, AIC = 58.586). Frequent consumption of the remaining six items of a planetary health diet, namely fish dishes, egg dishes, soybeans/soybean products, dairy foods, vegetable dishes, and fruit intake, had a significant positive correlation (0.50, P < 0.001) with eating breakfast regularly and a significant positive path (standardized estimate 0.56, P < 0.001) to eating a well-balanced diet.
Conclusions: In male university students, recommending the regular eating of a well-balanced breakfast, combined with a planetary health diet approach from the perspective of the SDGs, may lead to the consumption of a well-balanced diet.
