Chronotype and diet quality: mediating roles of stress, anxiety and depression in university students

Evening chronotype has been linked with depression and dietary behaviour. However, the mechanism that links circadian preference to diet quality in university students remains unclear. Psychological distress may mediate this pathway among university students prone to social jet lag.

The present study investigates whether psychological distress mediates the association between chronotype and diet quality associations in university students, and to explore gender specific patterns.

A cross-sectional study was conducted among 238 university students in Haryana, India (mean age-21.1 ± 3.15 years). The participants completed measures, including the Diet Quality Questionnaire (DQQ), the Morningness-Eveningness Scale, and the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21). The Generalised Linear Modelling with 1000 bootstrapped resamples to estimate the indirect and direct effects of chronotype on diet quality via stress, anxiety, and depression, with confidence intervals including gender-stratified analysis.

The findings report that evening chronotype was significantly associated with depression (β = -0.118, p = 0.031) at the component level, with the chronotype depression link being stronger in females, but directly associated with poor diet quality (β = 0.0828, p = 0.063). However, the indirect pathway was not significant, and all the bootstrapped confidence intervals for indirect effects had crossed zero in the total sample and by gender. The model explained 3.2% of the variance in diet quality.

The study results indicate that sleep quality, together with light exposure, which the researchers did not measure in the research process, provides a better explanation for how chronotype affects students' dietary habits. The future studies should incorporate objective measures of sleep and daily light exposure.