Knowledge and interests about healthy eating habits and physical activity practice. A study with adolescent population

The purpose of this research has been to verify if the knowledge and interests of adolescents on food can be interrelated with extracurricular sports and other personal and family variables. Block II of the evaluation test of preferences and intentions of food behaviors has been applied TEPICA (Benarroch, Perez, y Perales, 2011). This block which measures the factors that influence on the eating behavior, in which have been included personal items, family items, performance of sports practice, and number of weekly hours of that activity. The participants, n=540, are students in state centers of Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) and Baccalaureate of a city in the North of Spain. First, an exploratory factorial analysis (AFE) was carried out for the validation and adaptation of the test. Then, using the obtained factors, Analysis of variance (ANOVA), Multivariate variance (MANOVA), bivariate correlation (Pearson's correlation coefficient) and effect size (Cohen's d) were performed. The results indicate that people who practice sports express more interest in food and the weekly hours of sports practice correlate, significantly and positively, with the incentive for food. In this way, the myths about nutrition are encouraged in the sports environment.