Channels • 2021 • Volume 5 • Number 2 Page 5 hall serves that day. As a result, students tend to do their own shopping to satisfy hunger. Quick calorie dense snacks were a consistent source of nutrition such as candy bars and pre-packaged/canned foods. These negative nutritional habits can be attributed to the high speed of college life and lack of tangible understanding of how these habits will affect their performance. Finally, the strongest theme that we found in our review of literature was the recommendation from the authors for nutritional experts to educate the participants, particularly in the athletic collegiate setting. There is a great need for sport dieticians and nutritionists in active settings so that athletes can have a readily available, reliable source of information. Again, several surveys in our review found that the largest sources of nutrition information were family members, close friends, and the internet. Nutrition experts were rarely consulted. Combining the correlations between nutrition education sources, the belief that personal nutrition knowledge is adequate, and low scores on many of these nutrition surveys is highly suggestive of the need for readily available nutrition experts, particularly in athletic settings. Comparison to Other Studies While the set-up of our research study closely mirrored many other previous studies in terms of general population and general application process of the questionnaire, our study was also different than many in the following key ways. It studied student-athletes from Division II institutions in order to help increase the body of research regarding nutrition knowledge of Division II collegiate athletes. This is an important difference since Division II student-athletes are currently under-represented in the available literature regarding nutrition knowledge compared to other Divisions. It utilized the 49-SNKI questionnaire. We believe that the use of this questionnaire gave our study two important distinctions from others. First, because this is a more recent questionnaire, the body of available literature surrounding it is very limited. While other nutrition knowledge questionnaires may have larger bodies of literature surrounding them, we were excited to work with a questionnaire so “young.” Second, this questionnaire is tailored to assess sport relevant nutrition knowledge. Because of this, our study was dissimilar from many previous studies. Methods We conducted a quantitative descriptive research study. This study was sent to Division II athletic programs throughout Ohio in the Great Midwest Athletic Conference (GMAC) in the Fall of 2020 academic semester. Any individual that was a current student athlete in a DII university could be eligible for participation in this study. This study utilized the 49-SNKI questionnaire as well as a few accompanying questions that reinforced the purpose of the study and created a more comprehensive survey to the DII population. Our research team added several questions regarding sample characteristics. These questions addressed the following topics: gender, current year in school, current course of study, current institution,
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