Nutrition education for university students and strategies for institutional health promotion: an integrative review

• Autor(a) principal: Berbigier, Marina Carvalho
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Magalhães, Cleidilene Ramos
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por; eng
• Título da fonte: Revista Brasileira em Promoção da Saúde
• Texto Completo: https://ojs.unifor.br/RBPS/article/view/5740
• topic: Food and Nutrition Education; Universities; Education; Health Promotion.; Educación Alimentaria y Nutricional; Universidades; Educación; Promoción de la Salud.; Educação Alimentar e Nutricional; Universidades; Educação; Promoção da Saúde.

Objective: To reflect on the university environment as a nutritional health promoting space with a focus on the strategies used. Methods: An integrative review of articles published in SCOPUS, MEDLINE (PubMed), LILACS and SciELO databases under the following descriptors: Nutrition Education, University Students, College Students, and Health Promotion. The review included original studies published between 2010 and 2015 in Portuguese, English or Spanish that reported a nutritional intervention strategy carried out with well-defined population of university students. Only 18 articles out of the 649 studies reviewed were included after the analysis of titles, abstracts and full text. All the studies were conducted outside Brazil. Results: The university environment was found to be a potential health promoting space in the international context that is still incipient in the national context. Positive changes in dietary behaviors were reported, although there were no long-term assessments. The main strategies identified were practical and theoretical interventions based on the social cognitive theory and motivation theory. Conclusion: The university environment has great potential for the promotion of nutritional health and the most effective strategies were those based on the social cognitive theory. However, this environment has been little explored in the national context. Changing this reality requires the redefinition of the strategies used and of the public policies and intersectoral actions that support such a practice so that it can be inserted in the social identity of higher education in Brazil.