Role of Demographics and Health Attitude in Consumers' Nutrition Consideration in Food Selection

A nationwide on-line survey of 3,000 households was conducted. Households were randomly selected from the database of 400,000 households who make up Ipsos-NPD marketing research panel. The purpose of this study is to examine how a household meal planner's perception of the importance of various dietary components in selecting food items is influenced by the person's or the household's socio-demographic factors and health attitude. Annual household income affected fat, calcium, and cholesterol considerations significantly but did not make any impact on the consideration of salt when consumers selected food items. Hence, the result implies that as income level increases, household meal planners are more likely to be concerned about fat, calcium and cholesterol. Older household meal planners were more likely to consider salt, calcium and cholesterols than their younger counterparts. Health attitude of the household meal planners significantly influenced their nutritional concerns. Those meal planners who read nutritional labels on food products and changed diet to reduce the risk of disease were concerned about all four types of nutritional factors included in the study.