Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 57, Issue 1, August 2011, Pages 253-262
Appetite

Research report
The joint moderating effect of health consciousness and healthy lifestyle on consumers’ willingness to use functional foods in Taiwan

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2011.05.305Get rights and content

Abstract

Functional foods marketed as promoting health or reducing the risk of disease open a promising avenue for consumers to pursue a healthier life. Despite the stable growth in functional foods in Taiwan, at present little is known about whether or not consumers with varying degrees of health consciousness and different healthy lifestyles will have dissimilar attitudes toward functional foods and will vary in their willingness to use them. Regression analysis of this empirical study verifies that consumers’ attitudes toward functional foods do have an impact on their willingness to use such foods. Moreover, moderated regression analysis (MRA) reveals that the joint moderator of health consciousness and healthy lifestyle indeed exerts an impact on consumers’ willingness to consume functional foods. Finally, one-way ANOVA tests show that there are some differences between the consumers of the “Healthy Life Attentive” group and those of the “Healthy Life Inattentive” one both in attitudes toward and in willingness to consume functional foods. The empirical results and findings from this study would be valuable for the marketers in the functional food industry to formulate marketing communication strategies and facilitate this industry's development.

Highlights

► Attitude to functional foods affects willingness to use functional foods. ► Joint moderator of health consciousness and healthy lifestyle affects use willingness. ► Healthy life attentive and inattentive groups hold varying attitudes to functional foods.

Introduction

Health is one of the frequently mentioned motivations when consumers make their food choices (Lappalainen et al., 1998, Steptoe et al., 1995). With recent advancements in food science and technology, functional products, often scientifically proved to be beneficial for health effects, are a new variety of foods that promise targeted improvement in physiological functions of the body (Diplock et al., 1999). When fortified with special constituents, some of the functional foods can not only enhance physiological functions but also reduce disease risks (Hardy, 2000, Kwak and Jukes, 2001, Stanton et al., 2005), resulting in improving the physical and mental well-being of men and women (Menrad, 2003, Roberfroid, 2000b). Functional foods thus represent an important growth category for the commercial sector in many countries around the world (Sibbel, 2007). The steady increase in life expectancy, the desire of older people for the improved quality of their later lives, and the increasing cost of healthcare are the main reasons that explain why there is an increasing demand for functional foods in the market designed to confer health benefits (Kotilainen et al., 2006, Roberfroid, 2000a, Roberfroid, 2000b).

In addition to the commercial sector, the academic and governmental sectors have also focused on functional food development over the past decade. Numerous studies indicate that consumers are increasingly reflective in matters of health and willing to adopt health-oriented changes in their eating habits (Niva, 2007, Prattala, 2003, Saba, 2001). There are more and more consumers believing that foods contribute directly to their health (Mollet and Rowland, 2002, Young, 2000). Although no clear definition has been developed for functional foods so far and the absence of a universally accepted definition is one of the major difficulties encountered in assessing the potential health benefits from such foods (Blades, 2000, Heasman and Mellentin, 2001, Lucchina, 2003, Roberfroid, 2002), Diplock et al. (1999, S6) did give a widely adopted working definition, which describes a functional food as a food that ‘affect[s] beneficially one or more target functions of the body, beyond adequate nutritional effects, in a way that is relevant to either an improved state of health and well-being and/or reduction of risk of disease.’

Human food choice is a function of a multitude of influences. Such a complex food choice process influences food production systems and consumers’ nutrient intake as it determines what foods consumers buy and eat (Furst, Connors, Bisogni, Sobal, & Falk, 1996). The mechanisms of functional food choice are similar to the choice of the so-called conventional food products, but there may be differences in the perceptions of the perceived benefit of using functional foods (Urala and Lähteenmäki, 2003, Urala and Lähteenmäki, 2004). With recent advancements in modern food science and technology, the food industry can now provide increasingly sophisticated methods for controlling and altering the physical structure and the chemical composition of a food product. In other words, formulated to be significant sources of specific nutrients or other components of nutritional significance, the constituent of a food needs to be added, removed, or modified. As being less natural than their conventional counterparts, functional products are perceived by some consumers who value naturalness in food choices to be risky and are thus to be avoided (Frewer, Scholderer, & Lambert, 2003).

Increasingly affluent and ageing populations have become more concerned with protecting their health through diet. Consumers’ acceptance of the concept of functional foods and a better understanding of its determinants are widely recognized as key success factors in successfully negotiating market opportunities and consumer-led market orientation (Ares and Gámbaro, 2007, Gilbert, 1997, Gilbert, 2000, Grunert et al., 2000, Verbeke, 2005, Verbeke, 2006, Weststrate et al., 2002). As a consequence, there is a growing number of studies addressing cognitive, motivational, and attitudinal determinants of consumers’ acceptance of functional foods and/or their willingness to use them in different countries (e.g., Bech-Larsen and Grunert, 2003, Bhaskaran and Hardley, 2002, Cox et al., 2004, Gilbert, 2000, Huotilainen et al., 2006, Jonas and Beckmann, 1998, Korzen-Bohr and Doherty, 2006Poulsen, 1999, Urala and Lähteenmäki, 2003, Urala and Lähteenmäki, 2004, Verbeke, 2005).

According to Tuorila (1997), because attitudes strongly affect food choice behavior, they can be used to explain consumers’ food choices. An attitude can be defined as “a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor” (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). In addition, attitudes strongly guide how the information is noticed, adopted, and used or rejected (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993, Shepherd et al., 1991, Wilcock et al., 2004). Thus, the functional food industry related marketers should monitor consumers’ attitudes toward such foods to ensure that these new products and ideas fulfill consumer expectations and that any health-related information is communicated honestly and attractively. Previous studies indicate that in addition to demographic factors such as gender, age, or education, consumers’ attitudes and lifestyle factors strongly affect the acceptance of or intention to use functional foods (Bhaskaran and Hardley, 2002, Bower et al., 2003, Cox et al., 2004, de Jong et al., 2003, Urala and Lähteenmäki, 2004, Verbeke, 2005).

Not all individuals’ readiness to do something good to his/her own health and lifestyle are the same, despite the stable growth of functional foods in Taiwan and burgeoning research on such foods. It is of interest and significance to investigate whether or not local consumers with varying degrees of health consciousness and dissimilar healthy lifestyles will have different attitudes toward functional foods and will vary in their willingness to use them. Thus, the main objective of this study is to investigate whether or not the joint moderator of health consciousness and healthy lifestyle can exert its impact on consumers’ willingness to use functional foods. In order to achieve this objective, the impacts of consumers’ attitudes toward functional foods on their willingness to use them will be examined first. Secondly, in view of varying degrees of health consciousness and different healthy lifestyles, this study will investigate whether or not those people who lead a healthy life will have a more positive attitude toward functional foods and greater willingness to use them than their counter-parts, people who are indifferent to a healthy life. Finally, the differences between these two groups in the sub-dimensions of consumers’ attitudes toward functional foods and their willingness to use them will be further examined. The aforementioned research framework of this study is depicted in Fig. 1. The findings are hoped to provide some suggestions to the marketers in the functional foods industry to formulate marketing communication strategies and facilitate this industry's development.

Section snippets

Consumers’ attitudes toward functional foods

In order to have a better prediction of consumers’ willingness to use functional foods, Urala and Lähteenmäki (2007) developed a scale with good reliability and validity to measure an individual's attitude toward functional foods. With 25 functional food-related statements after three studies, the underlying attitude scale was further divided into four dimensions: Perceived reward from using functional foods, Necessity for functional foods, Confidence in functional foods, and Safety of

Health consciousness

The health-related motivation to prevent disease or improve health is considered as the primary cause of health behavior in most theoretical models (Newsom, McFarland, Kaplan, Huguet, & Zani, 2005). Health consciousness, which assesses the degree of readiness to undertake healthy actions (Oude Ophuis, 1989, Schifferstein and Oude Ophuis, 1998), is a broader construct to reflect a person's readiness to do something to his/her own health. Health conscious consumers are aware of and concerned

Healthy lifestyle

The idea that one's lifestyle will affect longevity has become firmly ingrained in the Western belief system. It is well known that if a person lives a life characterized by high fat consumption, high stress levels, a lack of exercise, and a poor social support network he/she will easily suffer from high blood pressure and might be further afflicted with vascular dementia (Whitlock et al., 1997). In recent years, lifestyle factors have become more and more important and are applied widely in

The joint moderating impact of health consciousness and healthy lifestyle

Despite the well known benefits of having a healthy lifestyle such as to exercise regularly, eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables, maintain an ideal weight, and not start smoking, only a small proportion of adults follow this healthy lifestyle pattern (Esposito et al., 2003, Stampfer et al., 2000). There is evidence that people with high levels of health consciousness tend to have a healthier lifestyle (Gould, 1990, Jayanti and Burns, 1998). According to Pferdekamper's (2003) study, both

Data collection

Cross-sectional consumer data were collected through a national self-reported questionnaire survey in April 2010. A quota sampling based on the standard statistical areas classification (there are four regions and 22 counties and cities on Taiwan Island) and demographics variables (i.e., gender, marital status, and age category) from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (2009) was conducted to establish the representativeness of the surveyed sample. General socio-demographics characteristics of the

Data analysis

The coded data was analyzed using the SAS program (Statistical Analysis Systems Institute Inc, 1999). Following Anderson and Gerbing (1988), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was first conducted to test for the quality and adequacy of the measurement model by investigating reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. After a series of purification, one indicator of “Necessity for functional foods” – I only want to eat foods that do not have any medicine-like effects (N6) – was

The main effects and the joint moderating effect analysis results

The regression analysis with the ordinary least squared (OLS) method was employed to examine the relationships among the four sub-dimensions of a consumer's attitude toward functional foods concerning his/her willingness to use functional foods as depicted in Fig. 1. The results of the estimations of the main effects and the moderating effects of health consciousness and healthy lifestyle are shown in Table 5. Model 1 explains 17.95% of the variance in the main effects on consumer's willingness

Discussions and conclusions

To the best knowledge of this researcher, this study represents one of the first attempts to examine the joint moderating effect of health consciousness and healthy lifestyle on consumers’ willingness to use functional foods. The empirical results and findings from this study are helpful for the continued development of the functional foods industry and to make a contribution to further research in this field. But some limitations in this study should be borne in mind when generalizing the

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    This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Council, Republic of China (NSC 98-2410-H-036-006-MY2).

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