Knowledge Regarding Health Hazards of Junk Food and Its Prevention Among Adolescents

Abstract

Introduction Good health is the necessity of living a healthy existence for every person which needs to maintain a healthy diet and healthy habits throughout the life. However, the habit of consuming junk food in many is increasing each day and making our future sad and diseased mainly our younger generations. Parents have to be very aware in the direction of the consuming behavior in their children and kids due to the fact in the early life they do not know and decide their good or bad so it is parents who are fully responsible for the good or bad eating habits among their child. They have to train their children approximately eating habits from early life and cause them to clear about the differences among healthy and junk foods. A pre-experimental with one group pre-test and post-test research design was used in this study. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the sample and the sample size was 60 adolescents’ students of high school. Data were collected by using structured knowledge questionnaire. Analysis was done by using descriptive and inferential statistics. The Result showed that out of 60 samples the overall mean pre-test knowledge score of study was 13.82(SD=4.21) and 29.06(SD=2.86) was the mean post-test knowledge score. The comparison of pre and post-test knowledge of adolescents reveals that the overall improvement mean was 15.24 with Standard Deviation (1.35). Association was done between demographic variables and post-test level of knowledge score of adolescents by using chi- square (χ²) test. The calculated chi square values was less than the table values indicated that there was no significant association between the demographic variables such as Age, Gender, Education,  Residential area, Type of family ,  Monthly income of family , Father’s education, Mother’s education, Father’s occupation, Mother’s occupation, Source of information  and Monthly pocket money of a child.