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Impact of nutrition knowledge on food evaluations

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 59, pages 1191–1200 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Objective:

This study explored whether nutrition knowledge interacted with evaluations of a food's healthiness to influence food attitudes (ie, global evaluations). Since attitudes guide behavior, understanding factors that impact food attitudes is one way to understand food selection and why factors such as nutrition knowledge have only a modest impact on food selection. We hypothesized that the relation between health evaluations and food attitudes would be stronger for people high in nutrition knowledge. We also explored the macronutrient composition of foods, and how it related to attitudes and health evaluations.

Design:

Survey employing multilevel analyses to examine within- and between-subject influences on food attitudes.

Setting:

Student unions at two universities in the Southwestern US.

Subjects:

A total of 138 participants (mean age=19.8; 69 males, 67 females, two unreported).

Interventions:

Participants indicated their attitudes toward; experience with; and health, flavor, and affective evaluations of 24 foods before and after lunch and completed questionnaires assessing individual difference variables.

Results:

Experience and evaluations of healthiness, flavor, positive affect, and negative affect all predicted food attitudes. Health evaluations were more strongly associated with attitudes for people high in nutrition knowledge.

Conclusions:

These findings suggest a mechanism through which individual differences impact food attitudes and thus likely influence food selection.

Sponsorship:

This research was supported in part by Grant MH47167-07 from the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Notes

  1. We do not report analyses involving familiarity because (1) familiarity and experience are conceptually similar, (2) the experience measure has more variance and better psychometric properties (eg, more normally distributed), and (3) preliminary analyses revealed that the two predictors had comparable patterns of results.

  2. We eliminated a handful of questions from the original Parmenter and Wardle (1999) scale because the items would not have been clear to our participants (eg, because some items had food descriptions that are not commonly used in the US). A number of questions on this test required multiple answers that were each scored as correct or incorrect, which resulted in a questionnaire that had 54 questions.

  3. Based on our previous research (Lozano et al., 1999), we expected food attitudes to be significantly more positive in the pre-meal than post-meal measurement sessions. The low measurement session variance demonstrates that this did not occur. One potential explanation for this is a relatively large number of prototypical snack foods (eg, apples, oranges) in the study. We conducted exploratory analyses to investigate whether the effect of hunger changes from the pre- to post-meal sessions affected attitudes toward meal and snack foods differently. These analyses revealed that attitudes toward prototypical meal, but not snack, foods were more positive when participants were more hungry (premeal) compared to less hungry (postmeal). Since this hunger effect is not a primary focus of this study, we will not discuss it further.

  4. We performed comparable analyses using dietary restraint to explore whether dietary restraint moderated the relation between evaluative bases and attitudes. These analyses revealed significant interactions between (1) restraint and health as the association between health evaluations and attitudes was stronger for people higher in restraint and (2) restraint and flavor as the association between flavor evaluations and attitudes was weaker for people higher in restraint.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by Grant MH47167-07 from the National Institute of Mental Health. We thank Brenda Hernandez for her assistance with this research and Louise Hawkley and John de Castro for their comments an earlier version of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA

    S L Crites Jr

  2. Department of Psychology, Syracuse University, El Paso, 79968, TX, USA

    S N Aikman

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  1. S L Crites Jr
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Correspondence to S L Crites Jr.

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Contributors: S Crites and SN Aikman.

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Crites, S., Aikman, S. Impact of nutrition knowledge on food evaluations. Eur J Clin Nutr 59, 1191–1200 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejcn.1602231

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