Effectiveness of Lifestyle Interventions among College Students: An Overview

摘要

College students are young adults in a transition phase who have the potential for positive behaviour changes via lifestyle interventions. These primary prevention strategies are expected to be more realistic and cost-effective, as compared with clinical treatment and can even be helpful in developing countries. A number of the intervention approaches via various techniques have shown significant and beneficial changes in dietary and exercise habits among college students. All the interventions with in the duration of 1 month to 7 months have shown significant improvement in the dietary and physical activity habits of the college students. These interventions also resulted in significant improvement in fruits and vegetables consumption as well as in behavioural control and weight loss. Some studies have reported that intervention resulted in improvement in health behaviour, and in physical fitness along with increased self-regulatory strategies. However, short-term lifestyle changes are evident as reflected in several studies but the long-term effectiveness of interventions is unknown. Therefore, long term effectiveness of theinterventions need to focused for the behavioural change.