The Willingness of Dietary and Behavior Changes in the Frontline Epidemic Prevention Workers During 2019 Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in China

Background: Frontline epidemic prevention workers play a pivotal role against COVID-19. Their baseline of dietary and behavior habits and willingness to change these habits after experiencing the outbreak of COVID-19 remains unclear.Methods: A self-developed online questionnaire survey was carried out via the WeChat platform, and 22,459 participated, including 9402 frontline epidemic prevention workers.Findings: Before COVID-19, 23.9% of frontline epidemic prevention workers reported a high-salt diet, 46.9% reported a high frequency of fried food intake, 21.6% reported a low frequency of fresh vegetable intake, and 50.9% smoked cigarettes. After experiencing the outbreak of COVID-19, 34.6% had the willingness to reduce salt intake, and 43.7% want to reduce the frequency of pickled vegetable intake. 37.9% had the willingness to decrease or quit smoking, and 44.5% want to increase sleep duration. Significant differences in the baseline of dietary and behavioral habits and willingness to change their habits were observed between the frontline epidemic prevention worker and others(P<0.05). However, for the frontline epidemic prevention workers with poor dietary and behavioral habits, the frontline epidemic prevention experience might be a promoting factor to adopt worse dietary and behavioral habits, including the high-salt intake subgroup (OR 2.824, 95% CI 2.341-3.405) and shortest physical exercise time subgroup (OR 1.379, 95% CI 1.041-1.828).Interpretation: The dietary and behavior habits of the frontline epidemic prevention workers were worse than others before COVID-19. They had more willingness to adopt healthy dietary and behavior habits after experiencing the outbreak of COVID-19. Because the frontline epidemic prevention workers, who had poor dietary and behavior habits before COVID-19, still choose worse habits, dietary and behavior intervention policies should be drafted to protect their health, especially for those poor habits subgroups.Funding: This work was supported by The Science and Technology Project of Bao'an (NO.2020JD101).Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.Ethics Approval Statement: This study was approved by the ethics committee of Guangdong Medical University.