Leveraging FDA Health Claims

Although past research has investigated different aspects of various health claims, relatively little effort has been directed toward synthesizing the reasons why some Food and Drug Administration (FDA) health claims are more successful than others. After outlining two necessary conditions for a health claim's success, currently approved FDA health claims are examined to explain both the diet--health relationship and its effect on the widespread awareness and adoption of the claim. Understanding what makes health claims successful provides useful nutrition education and product-labeling lessons for policy makers in all countries. ********** A health claim characterizes the relationship between a food nutrient and the risk of a disease or health-related condition (Federal Register 1993). These claims can alert consumers to a product's health potential by stating that certain foods--as part of an overall diet--may reduce the risk of certain diseases (Hurt and Crocco 1986). Such efforts, however, are not always successful (Caswell and Mojduszka 1996; Caswell and Padberg 1992). This research examines how the varying degrees of success of FDA health claims can provide insights that can help food regulatory agencies in all nations be more effective and influential in their nutrition education and product-labeling efforts. Past research on health claims has typically focused on a consumer's perceptions of a health claim's believability, simplicity, or clarity (Levy 1995; McMahon 1996; Silverglade 1991). While past studies suggested that when consumers processed health claim information, they seldom examined how any resulting lessons could be used to encourage the increased consumption of the healthy foods (Wansink 2005). This paper is organized as follows. First, we review how consumers learn about health claims and how their awareness of the diet-health relationship influences the acceptance of these claims. Second, the successes and failures of FDA health claims are analyzed to show how they can best facilitate the consumption of healthy foods. Last, implications for nutritional education, labeling, and marketing are illustrated in the context of soy health claims. FDA HEALTH CLAIMS AND THE DIET-HEALTH RELATIONSHIP Consumers receive information about health claims from a variety of sources. Product nutritional labels are a primary source of this information (Bender and Derby 1992; Feick, Herrmann, and Warland 1986), supplemented by point-of-purchase displays, special educational campaigns (e.g., Five-A-Day), friends, family, and fitness professionals. Since the information provided by nutritional labels is sometimes viewed by consumers as misleading and unclear (Porter et al. 1998), it has increasingly become a function of other sources (such as academia, government entities, public health communities, and medical practitioners) to provide credibility to health claims from their own particular perspective. Why Consumers Do Not Internalize Health Claims Changes made by the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act were intended to make nutritional information more useful and informative by changing the way the information was presented on food labels (Caswell 1992). In spite of these efforts, many consumers still believe that FDA-approved health claims are too vague, wordy, academic, and long (McMahon 1996). It has been suggested that consumers neither use nor comprehend nutritional information in their food purchase decisions because they are skeptical of health claims (Szykman, Bloom, and Levy 1997) or perceive them as incomplete or misleading (Silverglade 1991). Despite this general confusion with nutritional labeling, there are instances when consumers are able to accurately evaluate health claims and the information from the nutritional fact panel (Ford, Smith, and Swasy 1990; Ippolito and Mathios 1991). By building on these past successes, health claims can be developed, formatted, and disseminated in a way that facilitates a consumer's interpretation, belief, and use of information on product labels. …