Nursing Students Eat Rice and Beans but Skip Vegetables, Study Finds

University students are famously bad at feeding themselves, but a new study from Brazil offers one of the more detailed portraits yet of exactly how future health professionals eat when nobody is cooking for them. Researchers at the University of Pernambuco surveyed 61 undergraduate nursing students at the university’s Petrolina campus, measuring their bodies, their dietary habits, and the psychological patterns that shape their food choices. The results, published in the journal Food Science & Nutrition, reveal a diet anchored in traditional Brazilian staples, strikingly low in fruits and vegetables, surprisingly restrained on sweets and alcohol, and powered by an almost universal habit of daily coffee drinking. Perhaps most striking, however, is what the researchers did not find: no measurable link between body weight and any of the three classic dimensions of eating behavior.

The study arrived at a moment when Brazil, like much of the world, is living through what demographers call the nutritional transition. Economic and cultural shifts have pushed populations toward convenient, heavily industrialized foods that are dense in calories but poor in nutrients, gradually displacing fresh ingredients from the plate. Food, in this framing, is never just fuel; it is an expression of identity, family, culture, and social relationships. University students occupy a particularly vulnerable position within this transition. Many are living away from family support for the first time, juggling demanding academic schedules that leave little time for cooking complete meals, and routinely replacing proper meals with quick, high-calorie snacks. That combination, the literature suggests, favors inadequate intake of essential nutrients alongside excessive consumption of simple sugars, saturated fats, and sodium—a mix that activates inflammatory, hormonal, and metabolic mechanisms contributing to insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, and weight gain over time.

To capture this picture quantitatively, the team recruited students aged 18 to 45 who were regularly enrolled in the nursing program, excluding anyone older than 45 to avoid confounding from age-related metabolic and hormonal changes, and anyone taking medications with direct effects on lipid or carbohydrate metabolism. Data collection took place over two weeks in March 2025, with each participant evaluated individually in a reserved laboratory setting under standardized conditions: no alcohol for 48 hours beforehand, a 12-hour fast, no intense exercise in the preceding 24 hours, and light clothing for anthropometric measurement. Body weight was recorded on a portable digital scale and height on a portable stadiometer, yielding body mass index, or BMI, calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared.

Two validated questionnaires formed the psychological and dietary core of the assessment. The first was a reduced version of the food frequency questionnaire originally developed for the landmark ELSA-Brasil cohort study, trimmed from 114 items to 76 foods that together explain roughly 70 percent of energy variability. Participants reported how often they consumed each item, from daily to never, allowing the researchers to classify dietary patterns by food group. The second was the Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire-21, translated and validated for Portuguese-speaking populations, which scores three distinct behavioral domains on a 0-to-100 scale: cognitive restraint, the conscious restriction of intake to control weight; uncontrolled eating, the tendency to overeat with a subjective loss of control and hunger; and emotional eating, the inability to resist eating in response to negative emotions such as anxiety, sadness, or stress.

Demographically, the sample was overwhelmingly young and female: 93.4 percent of participants were women, 93.4 percent were aged 25 or younger, and nearly all were single and living in urban areas. Two-thirds still lived with parents or guardians, but half reported being responsible for buying and preparing their own food—a detail the authors flag as a potential risk, given the time pressures of full-time study. Notably, 6.6 percent of students reported using psychotropic medications without reporting any formal mental health diagnosis, a discrepancy the researchers attribute to possible underdiagnosis, stigma-related underreporting, or off-label prescribing. Because such medications can plausibly influence appetite and body weight, the team ran a sensitivity analysis excluding these participants and one student on a lipid-lowering combination; the results were unchanged, lending robustness to the main findings.

On the scale, the news was mostly reassuring but not spotless. Two-thirds of the students fell within the eutrophic range defined by World Health Organization criteria, with a mean BMI of 23.07 kg/m². But 15 percent were overweight, 8.3 percent had Grade I obesity, and 11.7 percent were underweight—meaning nearly a quarter of the sample carried excess weight and more than one in ten carried too little. The authors emphasize that BMI, while imperfect, is a meaningful early warning indicator: overweight developed in youth tends to progress over the years and is directly tied to the early emergence of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Even in a predominantly healthy-weight cohort, they argue, the presence of these cases justifies preventive intervention within the university setting.

The dietary data paint a vivid picture of contemporary student eating in northeastern Brazil. The diet’s backbone was unambiguously traditional: every single participant ate rice daily or weekly, 88.5 percent ate beans, 90.2 percent ate French bread, and 88.5 percent consumed farofa or couscous. Animal proteins appeared at moderate frequencies, with beef and chicken consumed weekly by roughly three-quarters of students and eggs by nearly all. But the diversity curve fell off a cliff at the produce aisle. Bananas were the standout fruit, eaten daily or weekly by 80.3 percent, yet papaya was never or rarely eaten by 62.3 percent of students, pineapple by 42.6 percent, and watermelon by 39.3 percent. Vegetable variety was worse still: 63.9 percent rarely or never ate kale or spinach, 80.3 percent skipped cauliflower, and 65.6 percent avoided broccoli, even while lettuce, tomato, and carrot appeared regularly on weekly menus. Fish intake was notably low, with over half the sample rarely or never consuming it, and dairy products appeared only irregularly. Sweets, ice cream, pizza, soft drinks, and alcohol were present but mostly occasional—a pattern that, against international benchmarks, reads as a genuine point in the cohort’s favor. Coffee, by contrast, was a daily ritual for 44.3 percent of students and a weekly one for another 27.9 percent, a frequency the authors link to academic performance pressures and warn can slide into insomnia, anxiety, and dependence when excessive.

Then came the analytical twist. When the researchers correlated BMI with the three TFEQ-21 domains using Spearman’s rank correlation, every result was statistically null. Cognitive restraint showed a weak positive trend (ρ = +0.134, p = 0.316), uncontrolled eating was essentially flat (ρ = +0.047, p = 0.729), and emotional eating was marginally negative (ρ = −0.018, p = 0.894), with all 95 percent confidence intervals spanning zero. Comparing domain scores across BMI categories with the Kruskal-Wallis test produced the same verdict: no significant differences in cognitive restraint, uncontrolled eating, or emotional eating between underweight, eutrophic, overweight, and obese students. Sensitivity analyses excluding statistical outliers and participants on appetite-relevant medications confirmed the pattern. The authors are careful about interpretation: with only six underweight and five obese students, the subgroups lack statistical power, and a non-significant p-value is not proof of no association. International studies with larger samples and adjusted regression models—work in Poland finding positive correlations between restraint and BMI in both sexes, and a multicenter Iberian Peninsula study linking emotional eating to obesity in women—have reported significant relationships that this small, unadjusted, convenience-sample design simply could not detect.

What the study loses in statistical power, it makes up in practical clarity. The convergence with broader literature is hard to ignore: a large Hungarian cross-sectional study similarly found poor adherence to healthy dietary patterns—including DASH and EAT-Lancet indices—independent of sex or socioeconomic status, concluding that deficient diets reflect systemic gaps in nutrition education and preventive services. Here, the irony is pointed. These students are training to deliver health care, yet their own plates fall short of recommended diversity, and many face structural barriers—full-time schedules, self-catering responsibilities, tight budgets on incomes concentrated around one to three minimum wages—that make healthy eating an uphill task. The authors call for universities to respond on multiple fronts: healthier campus food environments aligned with Brazil’s national dietary guidelines, subsidized and affordable fruits and vegetables, routine nutritional screening integrated with mental health support, and interdisciplinary programs tackling time management, emotional eating, and excessive caffeine intake. University, they note, is precisely the transitional period when lifelong habits consolidate, giving institutions both an ethical and an educational responsibility to model the health they teach. For a cohort of future nurses, the cafeteria may be the first classroom that matters.

Subject of Research: Eating behavior, food consumption frequency, and nutritional status among undergraduate nursing students in Brazil.

Article Title: Eating Behavior, Food Consumption Frequency, and Nutritional Status Among Undergraduate Nursing Students: A Cross‐Sectional Study

Article References: Nascimento, M. L. L., Vital, A. N. S., Cavalcante, T. C. F., de Souza, E. P., & da Silva, A. A. M. (2026). Eating Behavior, Food Consumption Frequency, and Nutritional Status Among Undergraduate Nursing Students: A Cross‐Sectional Study. Food Science & Nutrition, 14(9), Article e72376. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsn3.72376

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/fsn3.72376

Keywords: eating behavior, nutritional status, nursing students, body mass index, food frequency questionnaire, emotional eating, cognitive restraint, uncontrolled eating, nutritional transition, university students, Brazil, dietary patterns