Publication: Knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding functional foods among students in Universiti Sains Malaysia.
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Date
2016
Authors
Salleh, Nurul Ain Basirah Mohd
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Abstract
Functional foods can be regarded as food that satisfactorily acted to give advantageous effect on one or more target functions in the body. Knowledge, attitude and practices were shown to have an effect on the university perceptions regarding the functional foods consumption. This cross-sectional study aimed to determine the perceptions of the knowledge, attitudes, and practices on functional foods among university students. A total of 200 university students especially among Health Campus University Sains Malaysia (USM) students from the School of Health Sciences (PPSK) was recruited to participate in this study. Students were conveniently selected to complete the validated ‘Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices regarding Functional Foods’ Questionnaires. Likert scale was used to analyzed the answers, where a mean score >50 indicated that students have high knowledge, attitudes, and practices levels. There were more female (n=132; 66%) than male (n=68; 34%) students involved and majority were Malays (n=160; 80%). In terms of gender have showed significant difference with the knowledge scores (p<0.012) compared to other socio-demographic factors did not show any significant differences with knowledge, attitudes, and practices score. There were negative correlation between the knowledge scores with attitudes (r= -0.049) and practices (r= -0.006) scores tested by using Spearmans’ correlation. Meanwhile, the association between perceptions with sociodemographic characteristics were test using Chi-squared test where the results had shown there is no significant association between it (p>0.05). Therefore, it is important to assessed university students’ knowledge, attitudes and current practices of food consumptions to know if their perceptions are right about functional foods.