ABSTRACT

Nutrition knowledge on food labels is an important source of nutrition information but is typically underutilized by consumers. Knowing the level of consumer’s nutritional knowledge is useful for promoting dietary habits. This study examined the effect of anthropometric status and nutritional knowledge on food label reading behavior of young mothers in Aba. A total number of 204 young mothers aged 16-40 years, were used in cross sectional study and the respondents each filled the questionnaire which was divided into 4 sections namely; socio-economic/demographic, Nutritional Knowledge, Reading behavior and anthropometric measurements. Most of (52%) the respondents had tertiary education and few (4.9%) had no formal education. The result further revealed that 2% earned below 10,000 while 20.1% earned above 90,000. Approximately, 43.6% of the respondents were unemployed; this is higher than the 2016 unemployment report in Nigeria with 16.3% women being unemployed.  Table 4.2b shows the total test scores of nutrition knowledge of respondents and it revealed that many (64.5%) of the respondents had good nutritional knowledge, few (23.8%) had moderate knowledge while 11.7% of the respondents had poor knowledge. The mean knowledge of the respondents towards dietary supplement was 66.7+57.8 (Maximum Score 15). From the table 4.3 below, a good number of the respondents (67.2%) indicated that they do not. More than half of the population (55.9%) indicated that food labels affect their feeding behaviour. Most of the population (82.8%) fell under the normal BMI (18.5-24.9) while others fell underweight (6.4%), Overweight (7.4%), and Obese (3.4%). This study has revealed that anthropometric measurements and nutritional knowledge has a positive effect on food label reading behaviour of young mothers as more than 59.3% of the population had good reading habit due. The study also revealed that awareness and knowledge of nutrition is associated with anthropometric status as majority of young mothers had good knowledge of nutritional information and at the same time had normal anthropometric measurements.