OBESITY AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOLS FEMALE STUDENTS

H. Ansaf, Alla; H. Shemal, Assel

	OBESITY AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOLS FEMALE STUDENTS
AL-TAQANI
Article 1, Volume 24, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 149-155
Authors
Alla H. Ansaf; Assel H. Shemal
Abstract
The present paper is a cross-sectional study conducted on secondary schools female students in Benghazi, Libya, over a six-months period, from October 2007 to March 2008 . The survey adopted a multi-stage random sample. The number of students in the sample were 2509 from the total number of 21209 students, this sample represents 11.8% from the total number of female students. The dietary behavior , activity, obesity related knowledge and family history data were obtained . The chi-square (χ2) test was used to compare the prevalence rate of obesity in relation to certain characteristics, dietary, and activity. Odds ratio (OR) and the corresponding 95% of confidence interval (95% C.I) were used to estimate the risk factors. The results of this study provide evidence of a high prevalence of overweight and obesity among the students ( 34.1%). The important risk factors for obesity observed in this study were family history, eating whilst watching television, lack of physical activity, and high calorie diet. It is noted that 67.6% of students did not monitor their weight regularly. In addition, it found that 98.3% agreed to the opinion that exercise is essential for health, and 94.5% agreed that obesity was dangerous for health. We also found that only 43.2% believed that fast food contains a lot of bad lipid. We recommend that there should be an integrated program to raise awareness of the dangers of obesity and how to avoid it, as well as improving students' knowledge about nutrition and healthy eating habits to promote healthy body weight management and reduce the overweight and obesity.

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