Eating behaviors, oral health care knowledge, and oral hygiene practices among residents in Fujian province, China: a cross-sectional study.

Background: There is little literature that focuses on eating behaviors, oral health care knowledge and oral hygiene habits at the same time. People's oral health is affected by a variety of factors. This study investigated the eating behaviors, oral health care knowledge, and oral hygiene practices among residents of Fujian province, China, with different gender, age, and educational attainment.

Methods: A self-administered questionnaire was designed and distributed through the online questionnaire platform, Questionnaire Star. After excluding unqualified responses (due to excessively short completion time, conflicting answers, etc.), an Excel database was constructed. Frequency counts (composition ratio) were used to characterize data distribution, and the chi-square test was used to compare self-reported oral health, eating behaviors, oral health care knowledge, and oral hygiene practices across different age, gender, and educational attainment of respondents. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS (version 26.0), and differences were considered statistically significant at P < 0.05.

Results: A total of 10,480 individuals completed the online questionnaire, with 8,254 questionnaires deemed valid, yielding a validity rate of 78.76%. Significant differences were observed in various aspects of eating behaviors among respondents of different age, gender, and educational attainment (P < 0.001), except for the consumption of fruit juice and hard foods. There was a significant difference in self-reported oral health status among respondents by age and education (P ≤ 0.001), while the difference by gender was not significant (P = 0.303). The respondents displayed inadequate oral health care knowledge, with significant disparities among respondents of different age, gender, and educational attainment (P < 0.05). There were also significant differences in oral hygiene practices among respondents of different age, gender, and educational attainment (P < 0.05).

Conclusions: Eating behaviors, oral health care knowledge and oral hygiene practices of Fujian residents were related to age, gender and education attainment. Educational attainment was an important factor influencing the eating behaviors, oral health knowledge and oral hygiene practices of the population. Local residents' knowledge of oral health care was generally insufficient.