Background
During the last few decades, Croatia has experienced a rapid socio-cultural development that resulted in westernized eating habits, which, progressively leads to increase in obesity and type 2 diabetes occurence among youth, especially adolestnts and students. A substantial policy and intervention efforts been have made to increase students' consumption of fruit and vegetables and to reduce their intake of sweets and soft drinks. So far, only few domestic published studies have evaluated do students' food habits develop in the context of Croatian nutrition policy.

Aim
to acess eating habits and physical activity among medical school students who should be educated on this topic at the highest degree in comparrison with their socio-economic status.

Method
Food habits were identified by students' consumption of fruit, vegetables, sweets and sugar sweetened soft drink while data on physical activity was acessed by International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ).

Students were divided into two groups according to their socio-economic status. Socioeconomic status was evaluated as a place of stay: low income students were considered those who reported to live at University campus and take their meals at School cantine, while middle or high income students were considered those who loved in a private accomodation. A simple Pearson Chi-Square test and Mann-Whitney U test have been used to acess the differences inbetween groups.

Results
A total of 98 medical school students were acessed. Their median age was 20 (19-22) years, 69.8% females. About 51% of students eat three while only 9.4% eat five meals per day as reccomended by national gudlines. Only 22.9% of respondents consume breakfast two to three times a week band snacks were eaten daily by 16.9% of students. The median duration of exercise 2345.5 minutes a week while the average sedentary spent time was 7 hours. Eating and physical activity status was dependent on the socio-economic status: the students who lived at campus an took meals at School cantine were taking more sweets (p=0.007), had less phaysical activity/week (p=0.008) and were spending more sedebtary ti,e (p=0.020) in comparrison with the group of students with better socio-economic status.

Discussion
Despite the positive dietary efforts, the majority of Croatian youth are far from meeting national dietary recommendations. Our findings underline the need for more comprehensive initiatives targeting young people's food and physical activity habits as well as a more focused action to students located at Campuses

Socioeconomic status determines the eating and physical activity pattern of Croatian medical school students