Introduction

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brazilian Ministry of Health, in February 2020, following guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO), prepared the National Contingency Plan for Human Infection by the new Coronavirus COVID-19. As a palliative measure not to paralyze teaching in schools that adopted the face-to-face model of formal education, the Ministry of Education (MEC), in turn, published regulations to enable the flexibility of educational actions by educational institutions in Brazil ^1-3.

Thus, there was a global change in the way of teaching and teachers were challenged to adapt to a new working arrangement and most of them faced challenges related to pedagogical and technological skills and the home context, environment, often not suitable for professional activities (^4,5,6). Teachers were pressured in a short period of time to carry out a quick and unstructured change of work at home, to know the platforms used, to adapt their face-to-face content to the remote system, to restructure their teaching to be in contact with students per screen tasks that in the context of the pandemic have become a necessity ^7,8,9. The lack of quality internet access, availability of computers and cell phones in the family nucleus are examples of obstacles that are intertwined with this new work configuration and the domestic routine and, the teaching work, which is characterized by being exhausting, can be even more stressful in view of the exceptional health situation ^7,10.

Given this complex context, the following question emerged: how did the abrupt changes in teaching work and in the teaching-learning process, as well as work overload, influence your eating habits, as this relationship has already been determined in different contexts ¹¹.

Studies have shown that the period of social isolation due to COVID-19 influenced eating behaviors and food choices of several populations with different outcomes in relation to changes in eating patterns ^12,13,14. For example, some of these studies show healthier eating behaviors, including organic farming and fruit and vegetable consumption ¹⁵. Nevertheless, others show unhealthy eating habits including less frequent consumption of vegetables,

fruits, and legumes, greater adherence to fast food, increased consumption of frozen foods and reduced consumption of natural foods ^12,13,16. There are also those who have shown that the pandemic has not significantly changed their diet ¹⁵ and who have shown a greater proportion of increased consumption of different food groups, healthy or unhealthy, due to social isolation ¹⁷. Although these studies show a variety of scenarios in relation to food behavior, little is known about the relationship between the teaching work and food consumption in this context of pandemic.

Thus, the present study had the purpose of describing associations between home-working conditions and food consumption of teachers from the primary education of Minas Gerais during suspension of faceto-face classes.

Materials and methods

Results

The sample was composed of 15,372 participants, with a predominance of females (81.9%). Most aged 40 or older (58.8%) and income from 3 to 5 minimum wages (59.5%). During the pandemic 62.2% of those interviewed worked from 20 to 40 hours per week; 33% were dissatisfied with the remote work and 79.7% reported working more or much more than usual during the pandemic. Regarding computer availability at home, virtually half of the participants (46.7%) shared the computer with other people and 45.6% informed that the quality of their internet connection at home was regular or poor. Regarding food consumption, 20% of teachers had an unhealthy food consumption during the pandemic, 80% did not change their eating habits or had a healthy food consumption (Table 1).

In the bivariate analysis, virtually all variables were seen to be associated with food consumption, except for the following variables: income, understanding of online technologies and computer availability at home (Table 2).

In the adjusted multivariate model analysis, there was a significant association between eating habits and the following variables: gender, age, working hours (per week), feeling about the teachers’ work during the pandemic, workload during the pandemic and quality of internet connection. Regarding gender, males had a higher prevalence ratio (PR=1.26; 1.17-1.36) of unhealthy food consumption,

when compared to females. The age of 40 or older was associated with healthy food consumption (PR=0.63; 0.59-0.67) and (PR=0.79; 0.74-0.84), respectively. The following variables were associated with an unhealthy food consumption: working 40 hours a week or over (PR=1.18; 1.06-1.31), dissatisfaction about work (PR=1.26; 11.15-1.39), working more or much more during the pandemic (PR=1.34; 1.21-1.50) and regular or poor internet connection (PR=1.09; 1.02-1.16) (Table 3).

Discussion

Our data has shown that teachers’ remote working conditions are associated with a worse food consumption, and that weekly working hours, the feeling of dissatisfaction and the workload during the pandemic, as well as the quality of their internet at home were the variables that correlate with unhealthy food consumption. Several studies have already described changes in eating behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is quite reasonable ^15,16,19-22. The stress associated with the coronavirus pandemic, subsequent closing of schools, moving and adapting to homeschooling work, combined with the convenience of easily accessible, palatable, and emotionally comforting foods were reported in another study of school teachers Basic ⁸. Nevertheless, our study analyzed aspects relating teachers’ remote working conditions to their diet for the first time. Studies conducted prior to the pandemic had already identified the absence of data on teachers’ and school staff’s food consumption and food choices ²³. In another context and with different objectives from our study, Dias et al. (2020) showed that temporary contract teachers have the worst eating habits ¹¹.

Changes in teachers' eating habits during the COVID-19 pandemic were evaluated in some studies that demonstrated opposite situations, one of them recorded inadequate eating habits ²⁴, the teachers interviewed rarely consumed fruits and vegetables and the other observed a positive change in most eating habits ²⁵. However, literature is still scarce on teachers’ working conditions and food consumption, therefore, results from the present study are of great relevance and may guide studies on nutritional intervention with the target population, in order to analyze and better understand whether the working conditions per se may change the food consumption, or trigger feelings and unfavorable eating behaviors. The relationship between stress at work and food choices has been explored and explained through physiological mechanisms, which favor, for example, the consumption of comfort food (high-calorie food, also those that are rich in carbohydrates and fats) ^26,27. Thus, work overload and dissatisfaction with remote work, as potential sources of stress, may shed some light on associations with unhealthy food consumption by participants in this study.

Since professional activities have been online due to the pandemic, interviewed teachers were shown to have difficulties with the quality of their internet at home and their working conditions. These results have been corroborated by other authors who verified similar challenges and issues faced by school teachers during the pandemic, such as difficulties to teach online due to internet connection instability, among other issues ^28-30. Mishra et al. (28) have also noticed damage to overall health of teachers who have been working online for a long time. In a recent study, Ekpanyasku and Padungtod ³¹ investigated a magnitude of occupational health problems and lifestyle changes among workers from different companies who started working from home during the pandemic. Irregular food consumption has been identified as one of the lifestyle changes related to the intensity of remote work ^22,31).

In the present study, less healthy eating habits were observed among younger teachers. This result is corroborated by others research that considered adults and elderly people more careful and aware of the influence of diet on health ^32,33. Remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic did not inaugurate the precarious situation of teaching work, however it brought even more work overload, with a transformation of pedagogical approaches and the need to learn new ways of teaching, situations capable of causing greater dissatisfaction with the work among teachers and impact on behaviors and habits during the pandemic ³⁴

Since we have seen in the present study associations between remote teaching work conditions and a higher consumption of unhealthy food, it is important to look more closely at the health of such workers. Studies on relations among remote work, food consumption and health of teachers are beginning and there is a need for continuous monitoring of these teachers in the current context and when returning to face-to-face classes ³⁵.Previous researchers have also highlighted the need to adopt public policies aimed at this class of workers, focusing on improvements in working conditions and restructuring strategies to promote health, encouraging preventive measures, encouraging mainly the regular practice of physical activities and change in eating habits ^36-38.

The present study is limited. Among these limitations are the fact that it is a self-applied questionnaire, the fact that it is a crosssectional study, which limits the causal inference, as well as the assessment of food consumption, which is assessed according to food groups (healthy or unhealthy) and not according to consumption assessment questionnaires such as the 24-hour dietary recall, for example. The strengths of the study are the large sample size and the fact that it is the first to analyze teaching working conditions associated with changes in diet during the COVID-19 pandemic with a representative sample from the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. It is concluded that remote working conditions during the pandemic influenced basic education teachers’ food choices, with working hours and workload, as well as dissatisfaction with remote work and the quality of the internet connection as variables that were associated with unhealthy food consumption. Further studies are required to deepen issues related to both remote and face-to-face teaching working conditions and their implications in their food choices.