Channels • 2021 • Volume 5 • Number 2 Page 7 individual. The most common category was individual sports with 69 athletes, followed by team-contact with 41, and team-noncontact with 39. The research team split participants by their course of study into two groups, either medical-based studies or non-medicalbased studies. There were 64 participants studying in health-related fields and 84 in nonhealth related fields. The research team asked participants what their biggest source of nutrition information was and provided the following six options: “friends/family,” “personal research/internet,” “personal trainer/coach,” “athletic trainer,” “nutrition class,” or “none of the above.” Of the participants who chose to respond, 26 responded “friends/family,” 83 responded “personal research/internet,” 17 responded “personal trainer/coach,” 2 responded “athletic trainer,” 16 responded “nutrition class,” and 4 said “none of the above.” One last distinction in the population the research team asked about was whether participants had taken a nutrition class before. Of the participants that answered, 34 answered that they had previously taken a nutrition course, and 116 replied that they had not taken a nutrition class before. Results The research team did many different tests based on the differentiation questions added to the end of the 49-SNKI questionnaire looking for significant differences within the respondents. Only one test came back as significant. When comparing participants based on whether they had completed a nutrition class or not, the research team found statistically significant differences in mean scores between the two groups. The Levene’s Test for Equality of Variances was not significant, with a value of 0.467. The t-test for equality of means came back with 2-tailed significance values of 0.002 and 0.005. Because both of these values were below the alpha level of 0.05, and because Levene’s Test for Equality of Variances could be rejected, the research team concluded that participants who had completed nutrition classes had significantly better scores than participants who had not completed a course (Data for these tests can be found in Appendix B). The research team did not find statistically significant differences between scores on the bases of institution, major, type of sport, primary source of nutrition information, or gender. Discussion The research team found statistical significance between scores of individuals that had taken a nutrition class and those that had not. This concurs with Abbey EL, et al. who found that football players at a Division III school also scored better when previously exposed to a general or sport specific nutrition course. The research team believes that the findings of this study justify a call for more readily available nutrition education. The body of current nutrition research strongly supported this call to action. Many other published research teams come to the same conclusion about the need for better education for athletes in the field of nutrition (Abbey EL, et al., Heaney S, et al., Karpinski C, et al., Parks RB, et al.).
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