ELEMENTS INFLUENCING BODY MASS INDEX

The obesity pandemic is sweeping every age group. The aim of this study is to assess whether dietary and non-dietary habits are associated with increase BMI in male and female adults. In this study, dietary and different non-dietary parameters were randomly questionnaire to 50 non-vegetarian and 50 vegetarian participants along with measuring height and weight. Among the non-vegetarian, 21 participants were male and 29 were female. Same way from the 50 vegetarian 14 participants was male and 36 were female. Among the 21 male non-vegetarian (underweight: 3, normal: 16 and overweight: 2) whereas from 14 male vegetarian (normal: 12 and overweight: 2), similarly, among the 29 female non-vegetarian (underweight: 6, normal: 18, overweight: 4 and obese: 1) whereas from 36 female vegetarian (underweight: 7, normal: 23 and overweight: 6). In this study, mean BMI of non-vegetarian male (21.73 ± 2.23) and female (21.67 ± 3.74) and of vegetarian male (21.67 ± 1.90) and female (21.69 ± 3.17) was observed, dietary habits show considerably influences in the BMI values compare to non-dietary habits such as employment status. However, educational background to vegetarian BMI shows noteworthy difference (p<0.05).