## 1 Introduction  
Since healthy eating habits frequently persist throughout adulthood, it is crucial to be established during childhood [1,2]. Fruit and vegetable consumption tends to follow children's eating patterns in later life, highlighting the need to promote its frequent intake at a young age [1, 2, 3]. Vegetables are a great source of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other nutrients that are vital for healthy growth and development as well as the prevention of disease [4]. Consuming more vegetables is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and high blood pressure [5]. Additionally, eating vegetables was connected to better gut health and increased psychological well-being [5]. Conversely, poor dietary practices, such as a diet deficient in fruits and vegetables, can result in the development of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, some types of cancer, and weakened immunity [6]. According to the World Health Organization (WHO),a minimum of 400 g of fruits and vegetables should be consumed daily by children and adolescents [4]. To meet their nutritional demands for optimal growth and development, it was also suggested that they must consume a variety of vegetables [4]. While several nations have their vegetable dietary guidelines, all of them emphasise the need to include enough vegetables in children's diets [4,7]. However, in most Western nations, schoolchildren consume significantly less than the recommended amount [8, 9, 10, 11]. The key factors that mainly affect their consumption are sex, age, socioeconomic position, tastes, parental intake, and home availability/accessibility [12]. Vegetable eating at the early stages of life was associated with lifestyle and sociodemographic characteristics. Age seems to be one of them, as boys and older children often consume more vegetables than girls and younger children [12,13]. Another factor that is related to its consumption is a sedentary lifestyle. The extended use of computers or television might lead to a disregard for eating fruits and vegetables [14], whereas spending more time on screens was linked to consuming fewer vegetables [15, 16, 17]. Nevertheless, a review study showed a moderate relationship between screen time and school-aged children's lower intake of fruits and vegetables [18]. Conversely, it proposed that people who consume more vegetables are more physically active and fit [17, 18, 19, 20, 21]. Regarding its potential association with sleep, both short and long sleep durations are associated with decreased vegetable intake compared to the recommended hours [22,23]. Vegetable consumption is also related to childhood obesity [24,25]. It proposed that the lack of vegetable markets could deter children from choosing nutritious foods, which might contribute to it [24]. Moreover, a review study showed that youngsters who eat fewer vegetables are more likely to be overweight, while it is speculated that children who eat more vegetables are less likely to be obese and have lower BMIs [25]. Accordingly, there is evidence that vegetable intake is connected to student sedentary behavior, physical activity (PA), and physical fitness (PF) [14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25]. However, most studies have looked at each factor separately, with limited age groups and small sample sizes [14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25]. Analytically, researchers have explored the relationship between eating vegetables and sleep [7, 22, 23], sedentary behavior [15, 16, 17, 18], PA [16, 17, 18], and obesity [24, 25], in specific age groups [14, 15, 16, 17, 23]. Moreover, no nationally representative survey has looked at the prevalence of vegetable consumption among students or the factors linked to it [14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23]. Therefore, by providing descriptive data about the association between increased vegetable consumption and several factors in an extended, representative sample of students, the study could contribute to the scientific literature.