Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Body Mass, Physical Activity and Nutrition in Canadian Post-Secondary Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined changes in body mass, physical activity, and dietary intake and habits in Canadian university students during the first (March – September 2020) and second (October 2020 – March 2021) lockdown/restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two observational, self-reported recall surveys were conducted online; in September 2020 (T1) and March 2021 (T2). Five hundred ten (99 males, 411 females) students completed the survey at T1 and 135 of them also completed the survey at T2. The surveys included demographic information (age, sex, living arrangements, activity level, etc.), body mass and height, and a series of standardized questionnaires on eating habits and behaviours, as well as energy, macronutrient, and micronutrient intake. Body mass and body mass index increased in both males and females. Body mass increased on average by 0.91 kg, t(132) = -2.7, p = 0.008, 95%CI = [0.24, 1.58]. Importantly, a significant change was shown that between T1 and T2 with a greater number of participants identified as overweight (19.8% to 24.4%) than normal weight (61.7% to 54.8%). Body mass change was not associated with changes in physical activity and dietary intake. Females were more likely to decrease At Home Workouts compared to males with no other significant changes detected for type of physical activity in either T1 or T2. Energy intake significantly decreased by ~200 kcals/d. Diet quality also changed in both sexes characterized by negative changes in in both macro and micronutrients. Restrictive eating behaviours were found to increase significantly in females and were more frequent in those with eating disorders. Therefore, modest weight gain did occur during the pandemic in Canadian university students despite the insignificant changes reported in physical activity and the decrease in overall dietary intake, which can be possibly attributed to the changes in diet quality and dietary behaviours.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".