Assessment of Consumer’s Awareness about Food Adulteration and its Harmful Effects in the Body

Abstract

Adulteration of food cheats the consumer and can pose serious risk to health. Mere visual inspection does not serve the purpose especially when adulteration has assumed high degree of sophistication. Consumer awareness is the remedy for eliminating the evil of adulteration and sale of substandard food article.
The study was conducted in Lucknow district of Uttar Pradesh to assess the awareness about adulteration in food items and its harmful effects in the body . Urban area of Lucknow district was selected with a sample of 300 women respondents who headed their family. The data were collected with the help of pre-structured questionnaire personally by the researcher. It was found that majority of consumers had low awareness scores for adulteration in different food stuffs. There were only two food items i.e. cereals and milk for which high scores were reported by 7 (2.33%) and 1 (0.33%) consumers respectively. Regarding harmful effects of adulteration, majority of consumers were seen to be having low awareness about these. None of the consumers had high awareness scores about harmful effects of adulteration for any of the food stuffs. All the consumers had low score of awareness for harmful effects adulteration of fat. Mean scores of consumers ranged from 1.00±0.00 to 1.03±0.17.
Keywords- Adulteration; Harmful effects.