ABSTRACT

The study assess food labels knowledge, attitude and usage among male adolescent secondary school students in Ikwuano Local Government Area, Abia state. The specific objectives were to determine the socio-economic status of male adolescent secondary school students in Ikwuano Local Government Area, Abia state, to assess their knowledge on the use of food labels, to determine their attitude towards the use of food labels, to assess their usage of food labels and to ascertain the relationship between food label knowledge, attitude, usage and pocket money of male adolescent secondary school students. The study adopted school based cross sectional survey of randomly selected male adolecent's secondary school students in Ikwuano Local Government Area (LGA), Abia State. The data analysis was analyzed with descriptive statistic and correlation coefficient. The data was coded using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 23). The findings of the study revealed that show that majority (80.3%) had poor knowledge about food label while (11.6%) had good knowledge about food label. The result shows that more than half of the respondent (55.4%) had negative attitude towards the use of food label and (44.6%) had positive attitude towards the use of food label. The result shows that majority (63.5%) of the respondent had high usage of food label and few of them (36.5%) had low usage of food label. The result also revealed that there is a relationship between knowledge, Attitude, usage of food labels and pocket money of male adolescents. The result shows that there is positive and significant relationship between   knowledge score and attitude score with 0.349(0.01). Also, there was also positive and insignificant relationship between knowledge score and label usage score with 0.040(0.534). The result also shows that there is negative and insignificant relationship between knowledge score and pocket money with 0.032(0.617).  Also, the result shows that there positive and significant relationship between attitude score and label usage score with 0.519 (0.01). The result also shows that there is negative and insignificant relationship between attitude score and pocket money with 0.046(0.466). Finally, the study shows that there is negative and insignificant relationship between usage score and pocket money with 0.012(0.847). In conclusion, food labels inform consumers about the composition and nature of products to avoid confusion and protect the consumer against misuse, risk and abuse. This involves the practices on the frequency of reading labels, attention paid to the contents of a label and interpretation of the information given on labels for making a healthy choice.