The influence of eating behavior and sedentary lifestyle on blood pressure and body composition among young qatari female adults

Introduction: Obesity is emerging as a major health problem due to recent dietary habits and sedentary lifestyles in Qatar. The prevalence of, overweight, and obesity was over 23%, among adolescents girls in the country. On the other hand, the adult Qatari population has a high prevalence of hypertension (32.1%)(1,2). The aim of the study was mapping the early signs of hypertension and its connection to the dietary habits, to the inactivity level, and to the body composition of young adult Qatari females. Methods: 70 Qatari female students were involved from Qatar University, age between 18-29 yr. Blood pressure was measured by Omron HEM-780, body composition (body weight (BW), % of body fat (BF), were measured by OMRON BF-400. The dietary habit was evaluated by NHANES Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ). To clarify the subjects actual physical activity International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) was used. For data analyzes Chi-square test and univariate analyses of variance were used use by SPSS version 20. Results: The systolic (BPS) and diastolic (BPD) blood pressure mean values were in the normal range (BPS 114±1.44 mmHg and BPD 64±1.16 mmHg). Mean arterial pressure (MAP) was 87.71±1.15 mmHg. Mean BF was 28.82±1.44 and 39.65% of the subjects was overweight or obese. The crosstabs shown significant difference between the seafood vs. fast food (FF) consumption, however no difference was shown between the vegetables and pastas use. In the fluid uptake, soda and 100% fruit juice drinking did not differ from each other. There were qualified by an interaction between FF consumption and total weekly sitting hours (TWH) on BF, p = .16, ηp2=.164, where the main effects was FF vs. TWH (p=.01, ηp2=.245 vs. p=.451, ηp2=.012), but these effects did not qualified by an interaction on MAP (p=.256, ηp2=.055). Conclusion: Qatar puts big effort to popularized the regular physical activity in the society to prevent the appearance of non-communicable diseases (hypertension, type-II diabetes) (3). Based on our data 37% of the measured subjects has some weight problem which seems to be generated by their regular eating behavior and with less weight the lack of regular physical activity. These factors didn’t shown any interaction to the MAP values, probably because in this age group the different physiological protective mechanisms control well the systolic and diastolic pressure