Impact of nutrition education on awareness, attitude and practice regarding black rice among faculty members: A pre post intervention study

Black rice (Oryza sativa L.) is an anthocyanin-rich functional food known for its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and health-promoting properties. Despite its nutritional benefits, awareness regarding black rice remains limited among many population groups. Nutrition education is considered an effective approach for improving awareness and encouraging healthier food choices. The present study evaluated the impact of a structured nutrition education intervention on knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) regarding black rice among university faculty members. This pre-post intervention study was carried out among 70 faculty members of Bhagat Phool Singh Institute of Higher Learning (BPSIHL) and Bhagat Phool Singh Mahila Vishwavidyalaya (BPSMV), Haryana, India. A baseline assessment of awareness was done using a structured online KAP questionnaire. The nutrition education intervention program involved lecture, discussion, demonstration of black rice recipes and distribution of a black rice recipe booklet. Another assessment after intervention was done using the same questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and paired t-tests were employed in data analysis. Improvements were observed in all the domains of KAP after the intervention. Knowledge scores rose from 34.7% to 89.7% which corresponds to a gain of 55.0%. Scores of attitudes improved from 53.2% to 95.6% with a gain of 42.4%. There was also an improvement in practice scores which went up from 22.0% to 64.5%, indicating a gain of 42.5%. The computed t-values ranged from 10.8 to 12.3. This study revealed that nutrition education intervention can help increase the awareness, attitudes and intended practice of black rice consumption. Nutrition education interventions on traditional nutrient-rich foods could help in diversification of dietary patterns.

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Introduction

There has been an increased interest in dietary practices due to the growing prevalence of non-communicable diseases and their role in health and disease prevention. Functional foods which provide benefits beyond basic nutrition have become popular (Abu-Baker et al., 2021a) [1] . Black rice is regarded as a nutritionally superior cereal (Javed et al., 2025) [6] and loaded with antioxidants in the form of anthocyanins, phenolic compounds, dietary fiber, vitamins and minerals (S & Avinashilingam, 2025) [17] . Black rice is characterized by a black-purple bran layer which contains a high amount of anthocyanins which include cyanidin-3-glucoside and peonidin-3-glucoside (Liao & Yang, 2023) [9] . Anthocyanins are known for their strong antioxidant activity and their ability to protect against a number of oxidative stresses (Speer et al., 2020) [20] , improved lipid metabolism, insulin sensitivity, cardiovascular diseases (Mattioli et al., 2020) [10] , diabetes and certain cancers (Najam et al., 2023) [11] to these reasons, black rice is regarded as a functional food which has applications in disease prevention (Junuthula & Lakshmi, 2023) [7] . Though the nutritional and therapeutic value of black rice is well recognised, there is still lack of awareness among consumers (Rao et al., 2022) [14] . The absence of knowledge about the nutritional value, health benefits and culinary applications of black rice prevents individuals from consuming it. Various research has shown that awareness and nutrition education affect the consumer acceptance of the food product (Armes et al., 2025) [3] . Education intervention can help to develop knowledge about the food and bring about attitudinal and behavioural changes (Arora, 2016) [4] . Faculty members are an important group among whom to conduct nutrition education because of their education background and the role they play in disseminating knowledge (Antwi et al., 2020) [2] . Increased awareness regarding black rice consumption in the faculty members would help not only in their own dietary practices but also would help in conveying information regarding it in the community setting (Simbar et al., 2022) [19] . Therefore, the current study was aimed to assess the level of awareness regarding black rice among faculty members of BPSIHL and BPSMV and to examine the effectiveness of a nutrition education intervention on awareness regarding black rice (Reddy, 2021) [15] .

Methods

Methods

Study design and participants

This study involved a pre-and post-intervention study among faculty members of Bhagat Phool Singh Institute of Higher Learning (BPSIHL) and Bhagat Phool Singh Mahila Vishwavidyalaya (BPSMV), Haryana, India. Seventy faculty members volunteered to take part in both pre-and post-intervention assessment.

Development of the awareness questionnaire

An awareness questionnaire based on KAP framework was designed to measure awareness regarding black rice. The questionnaire included three main parts Knowledge of nutritional composition and health benefits of black rice. Attitudes towards the consumption of black rice. Practice related to consumption of black rice. The questionnaire was administered online using Google forms (Wu et al., 2019) [22] .

Pre-intervention assessment

Baseline awareness of black rice was done before nutrition education program. The respondents took the KAP questionnaire online and the scores were obtained (Nguyen et al., 2025) [125] .

Nutrition education intervention

The nutrition education intervention was developed to increase the level of awareness of black rice and involved the following: Lecture-based educational sessions. PowerPoint presentations highlighting nutritional and health benefits. Discussion of antioxidant properties and disease prevention potential. Demonstration of black rice based recipes. Distribution of educational material and recipe booklets.

Interactive question and answer sessions. The intervention emphasized practical approaches to incorporate black rice into daily diets (Seesen et al., 2020) [18] .

Post-intervention assessment

The same questionnaire was taken with the same participants after the nutrition education session (Abu-Baker et al., 2021b) [1] . The difference in the level of awareness scores was used as an indicator of the effectiveness of the nutrition education intervention program (Vasquez-Mamani et al., 2025) [21] .

Statistical analysis

The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics in terms of mean, standard error and percentages. The differences between pre-and post-intervention scores were determined using paired t-tests. The graph shows a marked improvement in awareness levels across all domains after the intervention. The highest awareness gain was observed in the Knowledge domain (55.0%), followed by Practice (42.5%) and Attitude (42.4%), indicating the effectiveness of the awareness program. Baseline assessment showed that the awareness regarding black rice was poor among the faculty members. Scores of knowledges were just 34.7% which showed that the participants had limited information about the nutritional value and health benefits of black rice. Practice scores were very low (22.0%) which meant that the participants rarely consumed black rice. The attitude scores were comparatively higher (53.2%) which meant that there was some openness towards consumption of healthier foods.

Results

Results

Table 1: Pre-and post-intervention awareness scores among faculty members

After the nutrition education intervention, a remarkable improvement was observed in all the domains. Scores of knowledges improved to 89.7%, showing a gain of 55.0%. The attitude scores improved to 95.6%, showing that there was a good attitude towards black rice. There was also an improvement in practice scores to 64.5%. All the above changes were statistically significant with t-values ranging from 10.8 to 12.3.

Discussion

This study revealed that the nutrition education intervention was effective in increasing the awareness regarding black rice among the university faculty members. Significant improvement in the scores of knowledges indicated that the participants had limited exposure to the knowledge regarding the nutritional value of black rice. The education intervention helped in filling up the knowledge gap.

The improvement in practice score shows that the nutritional education can bring about behavioral change. However, the practice scores were lower than those of knowledge and attitude scores indicating that the adoption of the healthy behavior requires more time, availability and reinforcement. The involvement of practical aspect in the intervention like recipes of black rice has also helped in behavioral change.

Studies have shown that the experiential learning increases the food acceptance. Faculty members are influential individuals in the community and educational institutions. Therefore, improved awareness of the faculty members may help in spreading the nutrition information and also increased acceptability of traditional nutrient-rich foods like black rice.

Conclusion

This study showed that the awareness regarding black rice was relatively low among the university faculty members before intervention. The nutrition education intervention significantly improved the scores of knowledge, attitude and practice, confirming the effectiveness of the nutrition education intervention on the awareness of functional foods. Findings support the use of nutrition education strategies to encourage dietary diversification and increase the acceptance of traditional nutrient-rich foods.

Figures and tables from the paper

Domain	Pre-awareness (%)	Post-awareness (%)	Awareness gain (%)	t-value
Knowledge	34.7 ± 1.2ᵃ	89.7 ± 1.2ᵇ	55.0 ± 1.3	12.3*
Attitude	53.2 ± 1.0ᵃ	95.6 ± 1.0ᵇ	42.4 ± 1.2	10.8*
Practice	22.0 ± 1.1ᵃ	64.5 ± 1.1ᵇ	42.5 ± 1.1	11.6*

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Pre- and post-intervention awareness scores among faculty members

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