Abstract

A study has been performed to provide the basic information about the current dietary habits, health related behaviors, and body indices and to bring forward the importance of this information to the people's attention based upon the relation between employee's life patterns and health conditions in their daily lives. Three hundred and five department store workers were examined from August 2006 to September 2006. With the average BMI values 23.9 +/- 2.2 for males and 20.0 +/- 1.9 for females, both gender groups were in normal, but 62.2% of the males were overweight and 15.4% of the females were under-weight. Regarding dietary and health related factors on how they perceive themselves, as normal were 204 (66.9%) the most and bad and very bad were respectively 43 (14.1%) and 5 (1.6%). Half of the subjects (43.2%) perceived sleeping hours to be insufficient, and 64.4% of them need to exercise regularly. As problems related to eating habits, they reported irregular meal times, overeating, preference of hot and spicy food, skipping meal, unbalanced meals. Regarding weight control they have attempted were the most (73.0%), after weight reduction, 51.2% of the subjects had side effects, such as gastrointestinal troubles, anemia, dizziness, sense of fatigue, constipation, physiological disorder, and diarrhea, etc. In the food habit score, it was shown that overall average score of the subjects was 62.63 +/- 9.86 which is lower than other studies. Female (62.76 +/- 10.15) had better score than male (61.67 +/- 8.06). While the item with the highest point was eat all three meals of the day, that was the lowest point, exercise every day. The food habit score of the younger group had lower than older group, and also they preferred sweet foods to other group. The results suggest that nutrition education for workers at specific working fields needs to be more focused on the improvement of dietary habits and health status of workers.

• Keywords: department store; dietary habit; health related behavior; weight control