Incidencia de la actividad física percibida sobre la composición corporal en el alumnado de la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC), campus mexicali (baja california, méxico)

Abstract

One of the most important health problems that the university population of Baja California presents is the one derived from a sedentary lifestyle, the most important repercussion of which at these ages is overweight and especially obesity. Reality observation shows that young university students often have unhealthy eating habits, such as excessive consumption of high-calorie and high-fat foods, and a lack of regular physical activity. In addition, university life can contribute to the problem, since students often face a great deal of stress, university life seems to limit the time that they have access to both facilities and resources for physical exercise. Therefore, it is increasingly important to establish policies that promote healthy eating habits and encourage physical activity among young university students to prevent and treat obesity. The fundamental purpose of our study is to determine the parameters that will allow us to know the scope and dimension of the problem for the university population of the UABC-Baja California (Mexico), as a "sine qua non" condition for the design and subsequent establishment of policies that can reverse the problem. In order to reach this level of knowledge, we have designed a random and proportional sample on a population of 21,592 students, admitting a margin of error of ± 2.5%, a confidence level of 95.45% and ignoring the variance. This has given us a sample size of 1490 students, to whom we have applied a triple indirect procedure based: firstly, on the determination of a series of anthropometric measurements; secondly, on the information collected through a short questionnaire; and thirdly, on the information obtained on various parameters related to body composition thanks to electrical bioimpedance. In this way, we aim to find, as accurately as possible, the levels of health enjoyed by the students in the study.