Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profiles, Academic Stress, and Health-Professional Advice Seeking among Undergraduate Nursing Students: A Cross-Sectional Study

Undergraduate nursing students are trained to promote health in clinical and community settings, but their own health-promoting behaviors occur in the context of academic demands, clinical training, work responsibilities, and limited time for self-care. This cross-sectional analytic study described health-promoting lifestyles among 506 undergraduate nursing students at the Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud, Universidad de Guadalajara; assessed internal consistency, factorability, and exploratory dimensional evidence for the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP-II); identified empirical lifestyle profiles; and examined cross-sectional associations of perceived stress, health-professional advice seeking, and health-information sources with HPLP-II scores. The overall median HPLP-II score was 2.40 (IQR: 2.06, 2.79). Internal consistency was high for the global scale (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.961) and ranged from acceptable to high across subscales (alpha = 0.812–0.900). Two lifestyle profiles were identified: Low HPLP (58.1%) and High HPLP (41.9%). In the primary HC3 robust model, health-professional advice seeking was associated with higher global HPLP-II scores (beta = 0.242, 95% CI: 0.140, 0.344; p < 0.001), whereas academic stress and vacation-period stress showed small inverse adjusted associations with HPLP-II scores. Sensitivity analyses, including IPTW, a modified HPLP-II score excluding Health Responsibility, and a model excluding willingness to improve lifestyle, showed advice-seeking coefficients in the same positive direction. The exploratory stress-by-advice-seeking interaction was not statistically significant. Findings should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects.