Abstract:
This study focused on the knowledge and preventive practices of Nutritional diseases and nutrients toxicity among University of Benin Undergraduates. Three (3) research questions were raised to guide this study. Specifically, the study seeks to; determine the level of nutritional awareness of students, establish whether the knowledge on the importance of good nutrition can help to reduce nutritional diseases, and to confirm the preventive measures that Students can adopt to reduce nutritional diseases and nutrient toxicity. Pertinent literature were reviewed to guide this study.
A descriptive survey research design was adopted to carry out this study. The population of the study was 44,140 students (21,881 female and 22,259 male) the population comprises full time Undergraduate students of the various faculties during 2021/2022 academic session.). A sample size of 146 was used, this was obtained with the stratified sampling technique. The research instrument used for this study was a structured questionnaire which was used to collect data from the sample population. Data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics such as simple percentage, frequency table and mean.
The findings revealed that students have high knowledge of nutritional diseases and nutrient toxicity, students know about the importance of good nutrition, they also identified limited nutrition knowledge as a barrier to eating healthy. Based on the study it was concluded that knowledge about nutritional disease is the first step to preventing it, this is so because students who knew that nutritional diseases were caused by a lack or excess of food nutrients could recognize that changes to diet was the best way to manage nutritional diseases, nutrient toxicity on the other hand can be prevented by adopting the tolerable upper intake level (UL) for micro nutrients. In line with the findings, the following recommendations were made: Incorporating nutrition education such as food and nutrition subjects in secondary schools.
