Jornal de Distúrbios Alimentares e Nutricionais

Assessment of Diet and Physical Activity Correlation with BMI

Muhammad Yasir Tarar, Muhammad Talha Farooq and Rana Danish Iftikhar

Assessment of Diet and Physical Activity Correlation with BMI

Objectives: • To evaluate the impact of long working hours on diet and physical activity • To find out the relationship between diets, physical activity and BMI of officials having long work hours. Methodology: It’s a Cross sectional study carried out over the period of 2 months in different private sector offices. The targeted population was officials of 20-45 years of age having more than 48 hr of work a week for last 5 year. Sample size of 100 officials was selected. Officials were selected through randomized sampling Officials more than 45 yrs of age with documented diagnosis of chronic diseases were excluded to avoid disparity in results. Data was collected from Allied Bank of Pakistan (Lahore), Faysal Bank Ltd. (Lahore), Nawa-i-Waqt Newspaper Office (Lahore) with the help of structured questionnaire and anthropometric indices were calculated using standard tools for measuring height, weight and body mass index. Informed consent was taken prior to asking questions from respondent. Anonymity of the respondents was also guaranteed. Data was analyzed by using SPSS version 17 and Microsoft Excel 2010. Result: Following results were obtained: Our sample comprises of 100 subjects 80 out of which are male and 20 females.80%of the population have a post-graduation degree, 15% are graduates and 5% are undergraduates.51%of the population has homemade meal for lunch while 49% eat bakery item and visit restaurants out of which 37% of the population go to restaurants more the twice a week.83% of the officials have no physical activity. While 9% have light physical activity. 32% of the population has a BMI greater than normal limits(18.50-24.99).60% of population who don’t have lunch has a BMI within normal limits(18.50-24.99).subject having homemade lunch 52% of them has BMI in normal limits (18.50- 24.99) while people having lunch at cafeteria and restaurants 41% of them has BMI above the normal limit. Population having junk food more than twice a week 32% of them has BMI above normal limits. Conclusion: Majority of the officials don’t indulged in any kind of physical activity and if done it is not up to the standard criteria leading to increased BMI. The BMI & dietary habits on other hand depict healthy life styles adopted by most of them.