Rallying Buckeyes

By Nathan Robinson Staff members gather around Brutus Buckeye at a pep rally sponsored by the University Staff Advisory Committee and held Sept. 5 in Ohio Stadium. Ohio State won 51-17 in its Sept. 7 football game against Kent State.

Consumers take box label health claims at face value

Placing a health or nutrition claim on the front of a food package is good enough to persuade many consumers to buy a product.

Time-crunched grocery shoppers usually won't stop to peruse a food label in its entirety, said Brian Roe, an assistant professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics.

In May, Roe and two colleagues from the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition received the American Marketing Association's Thomas C. Kinnear/Journal of Public Policy and Marketing award for their 1999 study on how consumers react to claims on the front of food packages.

Brian Roe studies consumer response to product health claims.   By Kevin Fitzsimons

The trio had gathered data from more than 1,400 food shoppers in face-to-face interviews in eight cities across the United States.

The researchers found that health claims on the front of food packages meant that a shopper was 10 percent as likely to read the nutrition facts panel on the back of the package. And participants who looked only at the front of a food package indicated that they were more likely to buy the product than were subjects who also consulted the nutrition facts panel.

Each participant was shown a mock-up of three food packages: strawberry yogurt, frozen cheese lasagna and raisin bran cereal. The researchers created 10 label designs for each product: one package from each group had no health or nutrient claim; one package had a nutrient-only claim; and eight packages from each group had one of eight health claims in conjunction with a nutrient claim. All of the labels contained the nutrition facts panel, the chart on the back of most food packages that contains information such as fat, cholesterol and caloric content.

Nutrient claims tout that a product is high in a specific nutrient, such as calcium, fiber or folic acid. Health claims give the consumer an idea about what these nutrients can potentially do to improve health.

For example, one box of raisin bran in this study contained the nutrient claim that the cereal was high in folic acid, accompanied by the health claim that "Diets with enough folic acid may reduce the risk of certain birth defects." Some of the lasagna packages contained health messages on the link between saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease while making a low-fat, low-cholesterol nutrient claim. Some of the yogurt labels linked a diet high in calcium to a lower risk of developing osteoporosis.

Each participant was given one package from each of the three product groups and asked a set of questions ranging from the perceived health benefits of eating this particular product to his or her likelihood of purchasing it.

Even when the subjects had time to peruse the entire label, most judged a product's nutritional value based on the information on the front of the package.

The presence of health claims, and to a lesser extent, nutrient-content claims, increased the probability that a person would look only at the front of the food package. Consumers were also more likely to attribute inappropriate health benefits to products when a health or nutrient claim was present.

"Most participants were satisfied with a simplified health claim on the front of a food package," Roe said.

In 1990 the FDA designed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, a set of regulations governing what food manufacturers could and couldn't put on a label.

"A food manufacturer has to show scientific evidence that a particular ingredient in their product does substantiate a health claim," Roe said. For example, a producer of raisin bran must show that the amount of folic acid in his product is associated with levels believed to reduce the risk of neural-tube birth defects.

Current food labeling standards provide a happy medium for the consumer and the manufacturer. "A consumer can be pretty confident that there is some scientific evidence to back up a health claim on the front of a package," Roe said.

More recently, Roe turned his attention to consumer awareness and beliefs about foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

He and colleagues from the University of Maine, Unity College in Unity, Maine, and MACRO International, an information technology firm headquartered in Washington, D.C., asked six focus groups in three cities across the United States about their opinions on GMOs.

The researchers found that most of the participants didn't understand what genetically modified foods were nor did they understand most of the issues surrounding GMOs.

"This surprised us, given the amount of media activity surrounding the issue," Roe said.

In most cases, food manufacturers aren't required to indicate whether or not their products contain genetically modified ingredients.

"A label is only required if genetic manipulation causes a difference in the chemical composition of a product," Roe said. "Although the FDA has issued suggested guidelines for manufacturers that want to put GMO labels on their products."

Even if labeling were mandatory, most of the participants remained skeptical that the labels would or could accurately convey the absence of genetically modified ingredients.

"A large percentage of our foods already contain genetically-modified ingredients," Roe said. "Even though one of the focus groups knew more about GMOs and issues related to these kinds of foods, they still had some misperceptions.

"All of the participants in the study were most startled by the large percentage of foods that may already contain genetically-modified ingredients."

OSU receives $9.1 million for osteoarthritis initiative

The Ohio State University Medical Center is one of four clinical centers being established as part of a national initiative to understand one of the most disabling conditions suffered by older adults: osteoarthritis.

Ohio State will receive $9.1 million to carry out its portion of the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI), launched by a public-private partnership consisting of the National Institutes of Health and several pharmaceutical companies. The seven-year project, which will recruit 5,000 people considered at risk of developing osteoarthritis, will collect information and design disease standards intended to speed drug development, which is hindered by a lack of measurable standards for disease progression needed for drug evaluation.

"Osteoarthritis is the No. 1 disabling condition among older adults. Despite that, we really don't understand the factors that contribute to why it occurs or what makes it worse," said Rebecca Jackson, an endocrinologist at OSU Medical Center and principal investigator on the project. "We need this large, long study to explain why in some osteoarthritis patients, the disease has a crippling effect but little in the way of pain, while others have minimal limiting symptoms but do experience a lot of pain."

Though osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease, affects several areas of the body, the consortium will zero in on osteoarthritis of the knee and, secondarily, the hip in both women and men. Osteoarthritis is the most common type of arthritis, especially among older people, and is characterized by the breakdown and erosion of cartilage that causes pain, swelling and loss of motion in the joint.

The four clinical centers -- The OSU Medical Center, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island in Pawtucket -- will conduct the observational study. The University of California, San Francisco will coordinate the data. The centers will establish and maintain a natural history database for osteoarthritis that will include clinical evaluation data, X-ray and MRI images, and a biospecimen repository. All data and images collected will be available to researchers worldwide to help quicken the pace of scientific studies, especially those related to drug development.

"We all recognize that these are resources that should be shared for the greater benefit of understanding the disease," Jackson said. "Collecting information on this many people will help tell us what factors contribute to development of the disease and provide us with universally accepted biomarkers. Some people in the study will come in healthy and never develop osteoarthritis. But there is value in that, because they will be part of a longitudinal data set that can show genetic predisposition for the disease, or behavioral factors, or both."

Ohio State's recruitment of 1,250 individuals between the ages of 50 and 79 will begin in May, with ethnic minorities expected to make up at least 20 percent of the study participants.

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