The role of health-related claims on consumer behaviour in Spain

In 2004, the Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health by World Health Organization (WHO) assessed nutrition claims as relevant tool to fulfil consumers’ requirements for “accurate, standardized and comprehensible information on the content of food items in order to make healthy choices”. On the other hand, one of the main concerns of society today are the increasing rates of obesity. According to the progress report on “Strategy for Europe on Nutrition, Overweight and Obesity related health issues (2007–2013)” (EC, 2010), has revealed that 30–70 % of European Union (EU) adults are overweight and 10–30 % obese (WHO, 2015). In the meantime, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) considers nutritional claims as “a main tool for preventing increasing rates of obesity and unhealthy diets in OECD countries”. In the same line, experts on public health policies consider knowledge and education on food and health as important tools in fighting overweight and obesity epidemic (González-Zapata et al., 2009). In the light of the above evidences, this study aims to investigate how the role of nutritional claims affects consumers’ behaviour in Spain. Especially, this study investigates personal characteristics such as sociodemographics, lifestyles and nutritional knowledge, attitudes and preferences toward nutritional claims among obese, overweight and normal weight consumers. In order to fulfil these objectives:  A review of the European legislation was conducted in order to identify those nutritional claims more related to obesity epidemic.  A market analysis was applied in order to detect those nutritional claims present in the market of Zaragoza and those products carrying these nutritional claims.  A total of 120 participants were recruited, undergoing two different tasks, one Implicit Association Test (IAT) aiming to identify implicit attitudes toward healthy and unhealthy products and a survey aiming to identify explicit attitudes toward healthy, unhealthy products and nutritional claims. Meanwhile other questions referring to health characteristics, lifestyles, intention to purchase products carrying nutritional claims and sociodemographic characteristics were included to the survey. The data analysis consisted in univariate and bivariate analysis, factorial analysis, cluster analysis and Probit model. Market analysis results indicated that among products considered healthy, bread and yogurt contain the highest number of nutritional claims. Meanwhile, nutritional claims related to fat and fiber are the most used in the Spanish market. Regarding less healthy products, sausages and pastries contain the highest number of nutritional claims, while claims related to sugar and fat have the highest prevalence in the market of less healthy products. Regarding IAT results it was observed that generally participants show positive implicit attitudes towards healthy products and negative attitudes towards unhealthy products. Moreover, no differences among groups were observed, indicating that all groups seem to show similar implicit attitudes towards healthy and unhealthy food products. However, no significant relationship between implicit attitudes towards healthy and unhealthy products and perceptions towards nutritional claims were found. Nevertheless, with regards to explicit attitudes towards healthy and unhealthy products, results suggest that healthy products are consider more palatable than unhealthy products and that overweight participants consider healthy products more palatable than normal weight and obese individuals. Still, the three groups have similar explicit attitudes towards unhealthy products. Regarding results on perceptions toward nutrition claims, all claims related to “fat” content are considered as more important by Spanish consumers, followed by claims related to “sugars” and “fiber”. Moreover, among processed healthy products, consumers consider more palatable bread, dry fruits and yogurts, while chocolate is the most palatable product among unhealthy food products. With respect to, lifestyles and eating habits, the factors analysis identified four factors: “concern about weight”, “eating control”, “exercising” and “eating disorders”. Cluster analysis identifies 4 clusters where the most representative group were overweight with high level of studies. Finally, the results of probit model on intention to purchase products carrying nutritional claims indicated that consumers are more likely to buy food products when they show positive attitudes towards potato chips and negative attitudes towards dry fruit in terms of palatability. On the other hand, when participants give more importance to nutritional claims, like “low fat” and “low energy”, their willingness to buy products with nutrition claims increases. Moreover, the probability to buy products with nutritional claims is higher when participants have university degree, prefer dairy and dry fruits to carry nutritional claims and they are careful in the food they consume, by selecting only those which they consider more healthy