The Prevalence and Consumer Attitudes and Understanding of Nutrient Content and Disease Risk Reduction Claims: Evaluating the Implementation of Nutrition-related Claims on Foods in Canada

An amendment to the Food and Drugs Regulations in 2002 made nutrition labelling mandatory (i.e. the Nutrition Facts table, NFt), formally regulated nutrient content (NC) claims and permitted the first five disease risk reduction (DRR) claims to be used on food labels in Canada. These changes were presented as a population-wide public health intervention to help consumers make healthier food choices. To this date, the implementation of nutrition-related claims has received little evaluation compared to the NFt. This thesis comprises four studies aimed at evaluating the implementation of Canadian regulations on nutrition-related claims. Study 1 uses the largest national database of Canadian food label information to estimate the prevalence of NC and DRR claims in Canada. Studies 2 to 4 evaluate consumer attitudes and understanding of a variety of permitted Canadian nutrition-related claims, including NC and DRR claims on sodium, plant sterols and oat fibre. Results show that consumers are exposed most often to NC claims that only describe the level of the nutrient and do not mention health. Therefore, the onus is on the consumer to know the claimed nutrient's health benefits. The consumer studies demonstrate that consumers respond more positively to any nutrition-related claim (NC, function and DRR) compared to a control claim on taste. The manner in which consumers respond to different types of nutrition-related claims depends highly on contextual factors, such as familiarity of the claim and the product carrier, and therefore attitudes and understanding of claims are not generalizable. Depending on familiarity, NC claims can perform as well as DRR claims or less so, but the criteria to carry these claims differ substantially. These studies demonstrate that the current implementation of nutrition-related claims in Canada is not optimized to help Canadians identify healthier food choices. Based on the study results, potential recommendations to improve implementation are discussed.Ph.D