An Analysis Of How Stress Impacts Dietary Habits In First-Year Students

The majority of students will experience stress during their first year at college. Stress can have many ill effects on the well-being of a first-year student and can even be a significant factor in weight gain – hence the term “The Freshman 15”. Sixty seven first-year students at the University of South Carolina were recruited to participate in a sixteen-item questionnaire focused on analyzing the relationship between stress and dietary habits. It was hypothesized that first -year students who had higher levels of stress would have significantly more unhealthy eating habits than first-year students who had lower levels of stress. A two-sample t-test found that the high-stress group’s dietary habits were not significantly more unhealthy when compared to the low-stress group’s dietary habits (p \u3e 0.05)