Abstract

Objectives: The study aimed to examine whether healthy diet score was associated with stress and social support among 472 Chinese college students in Korea. Methods: The study participants were 472 (187 male, 285 female) Chinese college students in Gyeong-gi area. From April 2013 to Oct 2013, participants were asked to fill out questionnaires on healthy diet score (20 questions), stress (20 questions), and social support (20 questions). Each question was scored by a 5-point Likert scale (total scores of each questionnaire were ranged from 20 to 100). Questions on healthy diet were sub-categorized as 'Healthy food eating (HFE)', 'Healthy eating habits (HEH)', and 'Avoidance of unhealthy food (AUF)'. Reliability test was conducted with Cronbach's ${\alpha}lpha$ (${\alpha}=0.79$). Results: Healthy diet score was higher in participants who stayed longer in Korea, who spoke Korean language fluently, and who assessed his or her own health status as very good. Adjusted means of healthy diet scores were estimated after adjusting for age, gender, body mass index, duration of staying, and Korean language fluency. According to tertile categories, participants with low tertile stress but high tertile social support showed the highest score of healthy diet ($72.59{\pm}1.45$), whereas participants with high tertile of stress but low tertile of social support had the lowest score of healthy diet ($59.22{\pm}1.54$). As for the three sub-categories of healthy diet score, the score of HFE increased as the score of social support increased. Conclusions: Our findings suggested that social support system is beneficial to alleviate stress and to improve healthy diet score.

Keywords

• stress;
• healthy diet;
• social support