Attitude and Practices of Food Labels among Consumers in Puducherry Region - A Cross Sectional Study

A healthy community is the basis for development of any country and one way to achieve this vital goal is nutrition. Consequently it is essential to provide the community with the necessary information about nutrition in food products. The present study aims to assess the attitude and practices of consumers above 25 years (n = 508) on information pertaining to food labels in Puducherry region. A cross-sectional design was used and cluster sampling was employed to select the samples. The study samples were consumers who visited the selected shops. Information pertaining to the survey was elicited through a questionnaire. The results showed that type of family of the consumers had a significant influence on the positive and negative attitude of the consumers (p<0.05), Pearson Correlation was significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).Similarly consumers from different regions (urban, semi- urban and rural) showed a significant difference (p<0.05) in attitude and practice. However, a significant correlation was found between the attitude and practice of the consumers (r = 0.37, p (two-tailed) < .05). Simple linear regression analysis showed that the attitude was a predicting variable to the outcome variable, practice. This model predicts 13.5% variance and showed that higher the attitude, higher would be the practice of using food labels. The ANOVA table shows the model is significant (p<0.001) with respect to practice (dependent variable) and attitude (independent variable). The study found that the consumer behaviour was more prone towards attractive food label. However, the consumer behaviour is not solely dependent on the attitude and practice towards the food label. Further studies are warranted to understand the factors influencing the attitude and practice.