Background: The maintenance of good health requires adequate amounts of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids in the human body. Dietary supplement (DS) consumption has increased explosively in recent years across all generations for obtaining several health benefits, promoting weight loss, and enhancing physical performance. We aimed to assess DS consumption awareness among medical students at Unaizah College of Medicine, Qassim University, Saudi Arabia.
Methods: In this descriptive cross-sectional study, a self-administered questionnaire was administered to the medical students, which included questions on socio-demographic characteristics, body mass index, nutritional awareness, knowledge, and patterns of DS consumption. Data were tabulated and cleaned in MS Excel. All statistical analyses were carried out using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 21 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY).
Results: In the study population, 77.3% knew the correct meaning of DS, nearly all the participants (90.9%) stated that DS can improve health, and the majority (70%) knew that DS are safe. The most frequently mentioned reason for consuming DS was to improve health (71.8%) and vitamins were the most commonly consumed type of DS (84.5%). Statistical tests revealed that aesthetics was the statistically significant reason for using DS in junior students (χ2 = 5.005; p = 0.025), whereas senior students significantly used herbs as a DS (χ2 = 4.090; p = 0.043).
Conclusion: Medical students were adequately oriented toward the true meaning of DS. Most of them knew that DS are safe and can improve health. Furthermore, there was sufficient awareness regarding the guidelines of daily servings of fruits and vegetables imposed by the Saudi authority.
Key words: Dietary supplement, awareness, medical students, Saudi Arabia.
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