ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health and Nutrition
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1577633
This article is part of the Research TopicIndustry and Individuals: Branding, Labelling, and Marketing of Food Products: Volume IIView all articles
Awareness and Associated Factors of Prepackaged Food Nutrition Labels by College Students in China: A Cross-Sectional Study
Provisionally accepted
Qian Liu1,2
Jinyi Chen1*- 1Sanda University, Shanghai, China
- 2University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, Shanghai Municipality, China
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The study assessed the ability of college students in China's economically and educationally highly developed provinces to use food nutrition labels and explored the associated factors affecting the awareness of food nutrition labels. A cross-sectional study was conducted among college students enrolled in five higher education institutions in China. This study used a structured questionnaire method to collect data, descriptive statistics, and multivariate logistic regression to analyze and process the data. The results showed that 71.8% of college students had low awareness of food nutrition labeling. Awareness of food nutrition labeling was positively correlated with the degree of need (OR: 1.903; 95% Cl: 1.513-2.394), frequency of use (OR: 1.780; 95% Cl: 1.537-2.062), and trust (OR: 1.113; 95% Cl: 1.009-1.229), and was negatively correlated with the study of nutrition courses (OR: 0.655; 95% Cl: 0.528-0.812). The most important way for college students to acquire knowledge about food nutrition labeling was online videos (52.4%, n=1318). Furthermore, frequent utilization of nutritional labels in food choices, high demand, and high trust in food nutrition labels play a significant role in enhancing the awareness among college students in economically and educationally highly developed provinces. In light of this finding, we propose a reform of the existing nutrition education system to enhance nutritional awareness among college students through a more diversified set of instructional approaches and the implementation of compulsory nutrition education at an earlier stage. Leveraging popular media platforms to widely distribute professing nutritional information during daily public nutrition education is also advised.
Keywords: food nutrition label, Prepackaged food, College student, food nutrition courses, Cross-sectional study
Received: 16 Feb 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jinyi Chen, Sanda University, Shanghai, China
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