Abstract
Qualified health claims (QHC) describe diet–disease relationships and summarize the quality and strength of evidence for a claim. Companies assert that QHCs increase sales and take legal action to ensure claims reflect their interests. Yet, there is no empirical evidence that QHCs influence consumers. Using green tea as a case study, this study investigated the effects of QHCs on purchase intentions among adults 55 years and older living in the US. An online survey using a between-subjects design examined QHCs about the relationship between green tea and the reduced risk of breast and/or prostate cancer or yukichi fruit juice and the reduced risk of gastrocoridalis, a fictitious relationship. QHCs written by a green tea company generated greater perceptions of evidence for the relationship, greater confidence in green tea and cancer, and increased purchase intentions for green tea than other QHCs. Factors that mitigated the claim’s effects on purchase intentions are: Race/ethnicity; age; importance of health claims; supplement use; health; worry about health/becoming sick with cancer; worry that led to dietary change; green tea consumption; and familiarity with the green tea–cancer. Consumers who made health-related dietary change in the past year and consider health claims important indicated greater purchase intentions than others.
Highlights
The food and dietary supplement industries have a vested interest in qualified health claims (QHCs) [1,2] because they offer a way to communicate with consumers about a product’s potential health benefit
Our results demonstrated that some QHCs increase consumer perceptions of evidence for the diet–disease relationship, which affects their confidence in the relationship and purchase intentions for green tea
Black and Hispanic consumers intended to purchase green tea more than White consumers. This finding is in contrast to previous research, which has pointed to White adults as more accepting of functional food products [40,42,43,44,55] this difference may be explained in part by the presence of a QHC which is unique to the current study
Summary
The food and dietary supplement industries have a vested interest in qualified health claims (QHCs) [1,2] because they offer a way to communicate with consumers about a product’s potential health benefit. QHCs describe the relationship between the consumption of a dietary substance and the reduced risk for a disease or health condition (i.e., diet–disease relationship). These claims are nuanced in that they characterize the level of scientific support for the diet–disease relationship through a disclaimer [3]. The level of evidence for a diet–disease relationship (and QHC) is determined by the US Food and FDA concludes that there is little scientific evidence to support this claim” [4].
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