Knowledge and attitude of adolescents on probiotic foods and their consumption

Abstract

The steady increase in awareness on healthy nutrition today coupled with the wish to keep the immune system strong has seen individuals turn to nutritional supplements and functional foods. Even though there has been a rapid increase in the production of probiotic products, no study has examined what adolescents know about probiotic dairy products, their attitude, or their consumption of the product. The present work therefore aimed to examine the consumption of probiotic foods among adolescents, and to investigate their knowledge of probiotics. The present work was conducted in four secondary schools located in three central districts of Ankara, and one central district of Istanbul in Turkey, involving 2,369 students attending the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. The scores of female and male adolescents who wanted to add probiotics into beverages were 44.4 and 55.6%, respectively. A statistically significant difference was observed in the demand for the addition of probiotics by gender (p < 0.01). The mean scores of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students for the statement “probiotic foods are rich in nutrients” were M = 4.08, 3.97, and 3.90, respectively, with a statistically significant difference (p < 0.05). Recent studies also have proven the positive effect of probiotics consumption on diseases specifically seen in children such as infectious diarrhoea, antibiotic-associated diarrhoea, necrotising enterocolitis in very low birth weight infants, and childhood atopy.