Research Proposal

Title
Impact of fast food consumption on health in Bangladesh: A study
of a university student

Submitted To
Muhammad Shahidullah Tasfiq
Associate Professor
Department of Management Studies
Jagannath University, Dhaka.

Submitted By
Abdullah Al Shafi
ID : B-170202134
Section : B
BBA 4th Year 2nd Semester
Department of Management Studies
Jagannath University, Dhaka.

Date of Submission : 17th October 2022.

Impact of fast food consumption on health in Bangladesh: A study of a university student.

Introduction:
Concepts, relationships, lifestyles are metamorphosed to accommodate the new jet age and eating
habits too is no exception. Healthy nutritious foods have been replaced by the new food mantra -
JUNK FOOD! In the context of world economy, junk food is a global phenomenon. The
availability of junk food and snacks at low prices and marketing strategies adapted by
manufacturers of such foods has triggered an evolution wherein, consumption of foods that require
neither the structure nor the preparation of a formal meal.
Fast food generally refers to the food that is quickly prepared within a short interval. Consumption
of fast food has drastically increased in Bangladesh. People, specifically the adolescents love to
eat fried and roasted food. It has been observed from many studies that people prefer fast food for
convenience (Hesamedin Askari Majabadi, et al, 2016), taste (B. Narayan & M. Prabhu, 2015)
and also for social interaction (M. S. Anitharaj, 2018) and also to attain pleasure. But in spite of
huge demand of fast food from larger section of people of the society, but consumption of too
much of fast food may result into cardiac disease or obesity. Strict supervision of fast food
companies is required. (Hesamedin Askari Majabadi, et al, 2016)
Through health education, a change towards good eating practices and adaption of healthy living
is possible. Research into junk food and fast food restaurants have found that there is a direct
relationship between the number of fast food restaurants located within the local area and obesity
rates. According to a survey by the Institute of Food Technologists, 75% of Bangladeshi's are
eating their dinners at home but 15% people eat nearly half those meals at outside.
By ordering food through Foodpanda, Shohoz food and other online platforms for fast foods which
are delivered, or taken out from restaurants or grocery delis. The way in which we eat, and what
we eat, is of vital importance to our state of health. With the global spread of food uniformity, its
rapid growth is occurring in the developing world. It has radically changed the way people eat all
over the world.

Background of the study:

“Eat healthy and live healthy” is one of the special requirements for long life. Unfortunately
today’s world has been adapted to a system of consumption of foods which has several adverse
effects on health. Lifestyle changes has compelled us so much that one has so little time to really
think what we are eating Is right! Globalization and urbanization have greatly affected one's eating
habits and forced many people to consume fancy foods, popularly known as junk foods. Research
into the possible health hazards on consumption of such high calorie foods has given an insight to
avoid them, but unfortunately measures taken are not as effective as they need to be. Diseases like
coronary artery disease and diabetes mellitus have seen a profound rise in developing countries
and such unhealthy junk food.
This part of the report is dedicated to studying several types of research that have been done related
to young generation’s food behaviour and forecasting restaurants success measures based on
consumer preferences.
A study conducted in Saudi Arabia with an intention to understand the factors that lead to high
fast-food consumption rate. The approached to collect data with a survey in the primary health
care centres and analysed the results with statistical tools. They concluded that education is
independently correlated with fast-food consumption rate. Besides, they found out that people
choose to go to fast-food restaurants when they have limited time, or they want to change their
taste or routine.
A study on about 400 families seeks to investigate on fast food consumption behaviour in Iran.
They found the reasons behind fast consumption are lack of entertainment and being busy at work.
In addition to, education, income, spouse profession, advertisement impact and availability of
restaurants near workplace or home are other influential factors behind fast food consumption.
Also, consumer consciousness has found negative impact with fast food consumption rate. Study
found that, overweight rate, the rate of diabetes, political views, and home topographical location
and other information can be predicted from the food-related tweets. For this, they have used the
language-based model. Topic modelling has further improved the analysis. They have used the
textual features of the tweets to understand associations between the dialect of nourishment,
geographic district, and group attributes. Over eight months, they have collected a corpus of meal-
related tweets. To aggregate, annotate, and query these tweets they have created a system so that
they can come up with a predictive model and visualization. After cleaning the data, they got some
hidden info about people in groups like their percentage of being overweight, the rate of diagnosed
with diabetes. This language-based model has more improved result than previous systems, and
with NLP (topic modelling), they have more improvements. To examine the effectiveness, they
have used unique textual features to understand relations between foods and geographic locations
and community characteristics. They filtered their desired tweets according to tweet hashtags,
which are meal related.
Knowledge highlighting about the eating habits, nutritional aspects, and quality of unhealthy
foods, their health impact and preventive measures should be given to create awareness and render
health education for a change towards good eating practices. Junk food and its impact on health
have been reviewed from various resources and have been systematically presented, so as to
emphasize its ill effects and measures to be adapted towards healthy living.

Problem statement:
By doing this study, I will investigate the impact of having fast food in people of Bangladesh
instead of taking healthy food.
Objective of the study:
The objectives of the study are in follows:
 The main purpose of this study is to investigate the factor's influencing fast food
consumption among adolescents in Bangladesh.
 To know about fast food preferences among school going children and adolescents
across gender.
 Assess the impact of health problems through the food habits in Bangladesh.

Research Methodology:
 The methodology which is going to be followed are given below in :

 Firstly, the categorical data will be replaced with a numerical variable. I will replace
each category of the categorical variable with its corresponding probability of the
target. I will appraise target-based encoding using for categorical to numerical process.
For example, we can observe from the Sex feature that there are 122 males and 48
females among total 170 responses to the questionnaires. Therefore, I used 122/170 =
0.72 as male value and used 48/170 = 0.28 as female value. In this way, I will convert
each categorical attributes’ value to its corresponding probability of the target. The
main reason for using target-based encoding over binary encoding is that the binary
encoding will increase the dimension of the dataset by quite a factor as there are lots of
categorical values with multiple variations. On the other hand, target-based encoding
does a similar job without changing the dimension. It enables different numeric values
to the same category for different features according to data.
 Later, I will plot bar graphs to visualize the frequency of each type of responses. In
addition to, I calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient with fast food consumption
rate in a fortnight and health features. Also, a statistical chi squared test analysis will
be tested between the population of males and females to check the dependency of
gender in fast food consumption rate and average spending per restaurant visit. Finally,
 a demographic comparison will be tested on fast food consumption rate among all the
divisions of Bangladesh.

Sample of the Study:

Data obtained from the convenience sample and literature reviews will be generalized for inferring
consumption patterns of Bangladeshi consumers (population). A total of 100 respondents shall
take part of this study. Though, careful consideration specified by the researcher. Consumers with
no age limit. They frequently visited in the fast food outlets like Domino's, Kentucky Fried
Chicken (KFC), Pizza Huts and many others population of interest. The sample of population will
be collected keeping in view the difference in food choice behavior exhibited by school and college
going children and families with and without dual incomes towards eating out and food away from
home according to the amount of work pressure and adoption of Western lifestyles. The criteria of
initial research is demographic variables-age, income, education, gender and stage in family life
cycle and psychographic variables, lifestyles, activities, interest and opinion shall also be used.

Population Sampling:
People who consumed food obtained in fast food restaurants in Bangladesh.

Sample size:
My sample is students from higher education institutions to corporate job holders. This is because
students in higher level and corporate job holders have much more maturity to make decisions.
My target number is 200 for direct collect survey. My main focus is to target in online survey for
more respondents.

Data Description:
At first, I shall make an original feature list that can relate to my work based on similar research
surveys conducted on other countries in the world and ground truth. I shall attempt to find the
features that can capture the common health issues, fast food consumption habits and average
spending per visit to a restaurant. For universal health issues, some of the features are feeling
numbness, fatigue after eating, catch colds easily, unable to lose weight, medicine intake and so
on. Also some other habits like the smoking habit, sleeping hours are taken. For demographic
comparison purpose, I have made the home district location of the respondents and divided them
into 8 regional zones in Bangladesh. The health-related questions only accept three categorical
responses: Yes, No, and Sometimes. Some pre-processing steps have been applied for few missing
values. For categorical features, I have filled the missing values with the most frequent category
in the column, and for numeric values, I have filled it with the mean of the column. Later, the
responses shall be constructed to a structured dataset.
The final list of features is demonstrated in Table I.
Feature Data type
Sex Categorical data
Height Numeric data
Weight Numeric data
What is your home district? Categorical data
Do you fell fatigued after eating? Categorical data
Do you fell numbness? Categorical data
Does cold or flu affect you easily? Categorical data
Do you smoke? Categorical data
Visit to a restaurant in fortnight? Categorical data
Money spend on per visit to a restaurant? Categorical data
Sleeping time Numeric data
Are you unable to lose weight? Numeric data
Does infections tend to linger? Categorical data

TABLE I. FEATURES OF THE DATASET

Literature review:
 Food hygiene :
In general, poor food hygiene knowledge and frequently engage in unsafe food handling
practice lead to foodborne illness. Study by Osaili et al. (2013) has revealed lack of
knowledge of basics food hygiene including critical cooking and storage temperatures of
food, cross contamination and personal hygiene within food handlers. It is necessary food
handler to have responsibility for ensuring the production of safe foods, and their
knowledge, attitudes and practice preventing from any food poisoning cases Angelillo
(2000). Human handling errors have been responsible for most outbreak of foodborne
illness. In preventing human error, channeling hygiene knowledge through education may
reduce the risk of foodborne illness. Gibson et al. (2002) suggest people who involved in
providing, processing and service of meal required to involved with hygienic food
preparation and the education. This demonstrates that the level of education is significant
factor in ensuring and main training appropriate food practices Jianu & Chiş (2012).

 Culinary internship part of training :

It is important that actual training to deliver appropriate knowledge is acquired and
effectively applied. Without a well-trained personnel which realize the importance of
hygiene rules in the food processing chain, implementing and maintaining a functional
food safety system is a goal very difficult to achieve Jianu & Chiş (2012). The performing
of safe food handling practices, learnt during food hygiene training, requires the food
handler to use the resources available to them and implement the knowledge and skills into
practical application Green et al. (2005). Student will be sent to various type of hotel, star
 rating and location in achieving knowledge by professional chef. That student must
complete their internship to earn their degrees.
According to Cullen (2014), culinary internship can reinforce and help embed knowledge
learned in the classroom environment. Training and education are essential to ensure that
workers have the awareness and knowledge necessary to comply with food hygiene
demands, although these do not always result in a positive change in food handling
behavior Seaman & Eves, (2008).

 Contingency of performance :
Knowledge, skills, and attitudes are needed to maintain the same or higher productivity
with fewer people. Competency in the human resources field defined as a personal
characteristic that can lead to higher performance Lustri & Miura, (2007). Competence
was categorized as the skills, knowledge and other attributes that result in success human
resource capability Johanson et al., (2010).Organizations use competencies in their human
resources practices such as job analysis, recruitment and selection, training, career
development, succession planning, and performance appraisal Chung-Herrera &
Lankau, (2003). Study by Lucia and Lepsinger (1999), have provided two importance
reasons of competency models in a competitive environment. The first reason is to ensure
that employees are doing the right things. Second, it has been suggested that competency
models are most useful when efficiency is necessary for competitive advantage. They have
noted that competition has also made it imperative for many companies to become fit if
they are to survive.

Research Questions and Hypothesis:

This research will formulate the following questions and hypothesis for explore more insights.
Those are following:
1. What are the factors influences on young generation for having fast food instead of taking
healthy food?
H1: Fast food is a place for gatherings and hangouts.
H2: Fast food is convenient and less time consuming.
2. What are the factors that influencing fast food consumption?
H1: Fast food increases the obesity rate in Bangladesh.
H2: Fast foods are lack of nutrient and might causes health matters if consume in a long term.
 Results and discussion:
Data analysis was conducted into two steps:
1. Fast round analysis that was based on the basic factors that came in view through secondary
data of fast food consumers.
2. Analysis of the factors those were significant for increasing trends of fast food
consumption. Basic factors taken from the secondary data, for the base of elected study

Appendices:
1. Duration of the research:
I expect that this study can be completed in only 26 days after the approval of the proposal. The
following is an analysis of assignment deadlines through the duration of the project:
Days Identify research topic and research plan
Day 1 Begin research
Day 2 Submit research guide
Day 3 Draft questionnaire
Day 4 Peer review questionnaire
Day 5 to Day 12 Submit questionnaire
Day 13 Draft proposal
Day 14 Peer Review proposal
Day 15 Submit proposal
Day 16 to Day 22 Distribute questionnaire
Day 23 Draft research report
Day 24 Peer review research report
Day 25 Revise research report
Day 26 Submit research project
References
Andrew Balmford, Rhys E Green, Jörn PW Scharlemann, (2005). Global Change
Biology 11 (10), 1594-1605
Beth G Chung-Herrera, Cathy A Enz, Melenie J Lankau, (2003). The Cornell Hotel and
Restaurant Administration Quarterly 44 (3), 17-25,
Bryan Cullen, (2014). The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 211 (2),
17 Denise Lustri, Irene Miura, (2007). The Learning Organization
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Definition of food and its constituents, (2012).

Gibson,Kimberley, Brian Stephen, Solan, Gregory Adam (2002). Publication of US6451939B1

Gordon, (2011). “The hospitality Industry Handbook on hygiene and safety for South
African students and Practicers.” Juta and Company Ltd
Hesamedin Askari Majabadi, et al, (2016). Iranian Red Crescent Medical
Journal 19(1) Jianu Calin, Chis Codruta, (2012). Food Control
Lars Johanson, Martine Irma Robbeets, (2010). Otto Harrassowitz Verlag

Lucian Lucia, Richard Lepsinger, (1999).Competency models: a review of the literature

and the role of the employment and training administration (ETA)
Maurizio Angelillo, (2000). International Journal of Food Microbiology 64(1-
2):161-6 Narayan Bose & Prabhu Marathi, (2015). Impact of Taste in Food
Oggiano, G. P. Food Safety and Hygiene. Journal of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Vol.
3, No. 3, 2015, pp. 1-2.
Osaili, Jamous, Obeidat & Bawadi, (2013). Food Control
Schirm, Kirkendall, (2010) “Panel on estimating children eligible for school nutrition
programs using the American community survey.”National Research Council, pp. 19-
141.
Seaman, Eves, (2008).International journal of environmental health research 18 (5), 365-374

Simon, Scott, (2011) Promises and Challenges of the Informal Food Sector in
Developing Countries FAO
World Health Organization. “Global Strategy for Health for all by the Year 2000.” No. 3, 1981.
World Health Organization. “Global Strategy for Food Safety: Safer Food for Better
Health.” 2002.