Evaluating the University Community Awareness of Fried Foods and the Risks of Repeated Use of Frying oils

Abstract

The study aimed to evaluate the degree of awareness among the university community (employees, students, and teaching staff) of Nalut University to the risks of fried foods and the used frying oils. The study included the following colleges: (Law, Education, Medical Technology, and Engineering). The study depended on the descriptive analytical approach to data, which relied on the distribution of 294 closed questionnaires. The results of the study showed that the degree of general awareness is good, with weighted mean was 1.99 and a percentage of 68.58%, as it showed, that 59.18% of the university community does not realize that excessive eating of fried foods, increases the levels of harmful low-density lipoprotein, whereas 54.08% are unaware of any information about free radicals and their risks. The percentage of those who used oil  more than once  to save economically, were  approximately  63.60%, where 41.8% do not know that the used oils frying affects some health aspects. The results of the statistical analysis also showed  significant differences at the level of significance (p<0.05) over the awareness of the study sample towards eating fried foods and  used  frying oils, and statistically significant differences were found at the level of significance (p<0.05) between the personal variables each one, On the other hand, the results of the statistical analysis also showed a positive correlation between the personal variables represented in (Gender, Age category , Job, Educational level, and Income category with the degree of awareness of the university community, which, the value of the Spearman correlation coefficient was 0.460, that was statistically significant at the level of significance (p <0.01).