Healthy food and its influence on consumption: Explicit and implicit attitudes

Abstract

Introduction: Food choice is influenced by several factors, including intrinsic and extrinsic food characteristics. Nutritional food properties, and, the health benefits provided by these, may affect this choice.Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of health allegations on food choices of adults explicitly and implicitly, by adapting the Implicit Association methodology. Method:The sample consisted in 108 individuals. For explicit assessment, the sensory acceptability analysis test was conducted in two sessions (blind and with information), to evaluate the influence of non-sensory characteristics. For implicit assessment, an implicit test was performed, using FreeIAT software. To evaluate nutritional status, weight, height, and waist circumference were measured and Body Mass Index calculated. To analyze the results, descriptive statistics were performed to observe the frequency, the mean ± standard deviation. In, addition, the t-test and Spearman correlation test were performed, adopting a 5% significance level. Results:In the explicit evaluation, it was observed that information about health benefits positively influenced food choice (p<0.01). When assessing healthy food information implicitly, it was clear that 43,52% of participants had a strong preference for healthy foods. Conclusion:The results showed that knowledge about the nutritional aspects of food interferes with food choices explicitly and implicitly. Also, the FreeIAT program proved to be an excellent complementary tool for studies, with consumers regarding food choices, being an innovation for researches in this segment.

Avaliação da percepção sensorial ao gosto salgado em pessoas hipertensas

“…Sensory properties include the intrinsic aspects of food, such as taste, odor, taste, appearance, texture and others, which are evaluated by the senses, such as smell, taste, sight and touch. 10 It is observed, then, from the influence of the taste on the food choices that this sensorial sense allows, to the individual, to select the foods that they like to him; thus, the salty taste in food is a predictor of food choices. It is known that individuals with a high salty taste threshold, that is, a low gustatory sensitivity for this taste, tend to ingest a greater amount of salt in order to identify the taste in the food 11 , which may be responsible for the development or aggravation of SAH.…”