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.