09.30.2009

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Who’s Eating Healthy? Where? When? Why?

Healthy Eating Trends 2009 provides a baseline of understanding on how consumers achieve wellness needs, goals and aspirations through “eating better” and diet. This report identifies emerging trends around healthy eating and updates consumer-centric language around eating healthy.

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Food and Mood

Trends in Treating Moods with Diet

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Consumer self-diagnosis of perceived ailments and allergies has paved the way for billions of dollars in sales of products with “no/low” formulations, as well as those offering enhanced and modified ingredient profiles. Interestingly, in keeping with common health and wellness behaviors that often see prescription drugs as a last resort, contemporary households we classify as “healthy eaters” are quite likely to be treating self-diagnosed moods and emotional states with their diet (i.e., foods and beverages) rather than turning to medications.

Whether or not self-diagnosed ailments, allergies or intolerances in fact have any physiological basis is largely irrelevant to most consumers. What is important for the near term is that such diagnoses are most assuredly driving daily behavior — for the afflicted consumer(s) as well as their household, and this includes not just self-diagnosed physiological symptoms (e.g., allergies to gluten or dairy) but emotional or cognitive symptoms (e.g., depression).

In shopping and product use, self-diagnosis influences the purchase and use of fortified or modified products that make the most inherent logical sense to consumers to treat physical or objectively determined “issues” (e.g., calcium consumed to ward off osteoporosis or low gluten products purchased so as to avoid self-assessed gluten allergies). Yet, perhaps less well understood or documented, is the use of foods and beverages to treat, prevent or augment non-physical issues— such as memory loss, depression, and anxiety/stress.

Our Healthy Eating Trends 2009 report shows that those 23% of consumers in households most interested in healthy eating (e.g., Healthy Eaters) are managing non-physical conditions through diet (see sidebar on right). Of significant interest is the insight that those most mindful of eating healthy over-index most on using their diet to treat conditions not closely tied to physical health (Table 1):

• Among this group, over half of those managing memory loss, depression or stress are turning to their food as an avenue for treatment.
• These maladies are age-related, often self-diagnosed, emotional or cognitive in nature, and resistant to satisfactory resolution through medical therapies.
• Consumers have accepted single-serve beverages offering these functional benefits, consistent with cultural preference to receive doses for these conditions in beverages rather than in foods.
  -Example Brands: Brain Tonic, Silk soy milk, Think-O teas, Odwalla Serious Energy, Vitamin Water Relaxed

Table 1: Functional Benefits Sought by Importance of Healthy Eating
Highest over-indexed health conditions being treated by diet

Source: Healthy Eating Trends 2009 Report. The Hartman Group, Inc., 2009; Includes only those treating or managing each condition
Question: Is anyone in your household currently treating or managing any of the following [25] health conditions through diet?

Take Away:

Most commonly, “functional” foods and beverages are objectively painted as aids or inhibitors to various physical ailments, allergies or sensitivities. To some extent, consumers have played along, displaying a willingness to even go so far as to accept calcium with their orange juice as a means of warding off osteoporosis. A less understood world of consumer behavior lies in the self-diagnosis and use of various products and ingredients used to treat cognitive issues that also coincide with aging. Our Healthy Eating study shows that as consumers try to maintain their mental and emotional health, they turn to a variety of remedies found in foods and beverages. These aren’t necessarily individuals who have gone to a doctor and been diagnosed with clinical depression. Rather, they feel sort of “blue” on a day-to-day basis and are looking for something to help without getting a prescription. Manufacturers, retailers and other food marketers should expand their vision of functional foods, beverages and ingredients reflecting that consumers most interested in healthy eating often turn to food for broad, preventive health benefits, as well as to manage conditions less tied to physical disease.

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