engleski

Alcohol consumption and smoking habits of basketball coaches

Sport in general, as well as other professions that are in close relation with sport are usually presumed to be in connection with life quality specially regarding health. Most of the laics would conclude that people involved professionally in sport lead a healthy way of life, take care about their dietary habits and avoid most of the habits that would endanger the health. Sports coaches would be a typical example of a professional who should be well aware of the basis of healthy living. The aim of this research is to determine the health related habits of basketball coaches regarding smoking and alcohol consumption. The sample comprises 61 basketball coaches from Croatia. For alcohol consumption and smoking habits determination, the new questionnaire was constructed based on previous national and international studies. The questionnaires were completed anonymously. The obtained data were analysed by standard statistical procedures, with statistical software package SPSS. According to the results it is obvious that about 20% of coaches are smoking which is less than in average Croatian population of the same age. Smoking is unfortunately widely accepted in Croatia and though the campaign against smoking is going on in many countries the real results are still not apparent, and the number of deaths caused by trachea, bronchial and lung cancer is still very high (Prabhat and Chaloupka, 2000 ; Samet and Yoon, 2001). The encouraging data is that most of the coaches smokers are smoking between 5 and 10 cigarettes per day (67%). 75% of coaches are consuming alcohol, mostly beer and wine. Most of them are drinking about 0.5 L beer or 0.2 L wine once per week or even less. About 11% of coaches acknowledge that they are drinking at club reunions. It is well established that large amounts of alcohol have detrimental effect on health influencing the most of organs . Lighter drinking carries lower total mortality risk largely because of lower coronary disease risk. The investigators connect this findings with antioxidant and antithrombotic substances present in wine, mostly in red wine, which are potentially beneficial against atherothrombotic disease and cancer. Sport coaches are part of the population that has its own specificities and because their connection to athletes, especially young ones, they way of life deserves to be researched. As sports have a very important role in many nations worldwide, and even though for that the athletes take most of the credits the coaches are of great importance also, so their education in all fields would surely contribute to improvement of an athlete´s performance.

alcohol ; smoking ; health ; basketball

nije evidentirano