Turkish university students' nutritional habits regarding cancer prevention and healthy lifestyles.

AIM Chronic disorders have been increasing over the past century, and the relationship with nutrition has been widely discussed. The present study was carried out in order to determine health school students' nutrition styles, health lifestyle behavior, and their interactions. METHOD With a cross-sectional design, data from 79 students in the Nursing School were collected via a socio-demographic data collection form, a nutrition form, and and a Health Promotion Life-Style Profile (HPLP) questionnaire. Percentages, McNemar data, Independent-sample t-test and paired-samples t-test were used in data assessment. RESULTS No significant differences were observed between the number of students with healthy nutrition and mean healthy lifestyle scores, pre and post-training. There was also no influence of presence of a family member with cancer and weight perception. However, there was a significant difference between HPLP scores before the training and six months following training (p=0.049) and the mean healthy lifestyle scores increased. CONCLUSION Students with poor nutrition who were trained in cancer prevention and healthy diets, demonstrated increase in their HPLP, yet this did not make a difference to their healthy nutrition behavior.