Abstract:
Nutrition is an important part of many sports like football players. However,
there were few studies addressed nutritional practice, lack of healthy food choices, poor eating
habits among athletes in developing countries.
Objective: To assess nutritional practice, associated factors and its consequences among adult
members of football players‘ clubs in; Eastern Ethiopia from April 15th to May 30th, 2021.
Methods: A quantitative cross- sectional study design was conducted among 125 football
players in Harar and Dire Dawa cities. Face-to-face interviews and anthropometric
measurements was directly obtained from the participants. For daily food intake, a 24 recall
was implemented in each football player for consecutive three days. Data entered and cleaned
using Epi data version 3.1 and exported to SPSS for analysis. Descriptive statistics and
regression model (CI=95%) was used to analyze the data (p-value <0.05).
Result: From a total of 121 (response rate 96.8%). About 45 (37.50%) of them were
overweight of BMI. About 45 (37.5%), 68(56.20) and 35.5% of them had good knowledge,
negative attitude and good practice, respectively. Moreover, the overall the nutrition practice
among adult foot ball members or players for seven days per a week was 19.8% (95%CI: 17.4
to 22.4; pvalue<0.001).The current study revealed that being male (OR═ 5.55, 95%CI: 1.20-
15.77) as female; Married (OR═ 8.52, 95%CI: 1.57- 17.5) as single; college (OR═ 9.46; 95CI:
2.16 -18.5) as primarily educations were higher nutritional practice when compared to their
counterpart. Moreover, the odds of good nutritional practice (OR: 5.19:95%CI: 1.58-17.03);
likelihood of good nutritional practice those >5000ETB (OR═8.00, CI: 2.54-16.12) times
higher among as compared to their encounter part. The final linear regression model results
revealed that having poor nutritional practice decrease the visceral fat of footballers by 0.029
[OR═ - 0.029, CI: (- 0.016, - 0.044)] when compared to participant‘s good nutritional practice.
Conclusion: The study concluded that majority of the football players had poor knowledge,
negative attitude and poor nutritional practice towards sport nutrition. Therefore, Ministry of
tourism and youth, regional and football players have a responsible in order to enhance
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knowledge and attitude and keep the recommendations of sport nutrition for good
performance
