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07.29.2009

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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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Healthy Eating: Connections to Attitudes About Aging

Youth is wasted on the young
– George Bernard Shaw

Healthy eating, in a sense, is about healthy aging. Health and age are objective physical characteristics, and healthy eating and healthy aging are subjective ways of living defined by the broader consumer culture. What does healthy eating have to do with healthy aging?

We can think of healthy aging as a phase in life that typically follows two earlier periods. The first phase covers growing up. Anything that concerns development, growth, getting ahead and related matters occurs in this first phase. It is here that eating centers on getting bigger, stronger, faster, sexier and smarter. Eventually, however, life becomes less about growing up and more about being a grown up. It is at this point that we enter the second phase, which is relatively short-lived and constitutes the period during which eating revolves primarily around enjoyment, discovery and experimentation. Consumers know if they haven’t made the transition to this second phase in a timely enough manner when their contemporaries increasingly exhort them to “grow up.” While in this phase, many consumers also find themselves initiating the cycle for their children, which often means dividing attention between their own hedonistic eating and managing diets intended to support the growth and developmental needs of their offspring.

Healthy aging, our third phase, comes hard on the heels of the grown up phase and turns on the realization that one’s tolerance for the excesses of youth has seen better days. When sentiments like “I really have to start taking better care of myself” begin overtaking desires to party until dawn, life is entering the healthy aging phase. This changing perspective marks the shift in orientation from living life as an adult to thinking about living life more intentionally and healthily.

Our quick charting of the trajectory of life will doubtless raise numerous objections that some, perhaps most, consumers never lose their desire to eat primarily for enjoyment or that no one is more hedonistic than children. Moreover, there are scores of young consumers who live very healthily and are very mindful of their diets. That’s all true, of course, and precisely why healthy aging is really not about age. That is, the different phases are not necessarily ones that individuals inexorably progress through as they get older. It’s not a model of developmental stages. Rather, it’s about states of mind.

Certainly, this idea of healthy aging is not just about getting old. The relationship between age and interest in healthy eating shows a steep rise in interest beginning at a fairly young age and by age 40 the proportion of consumers who say they nearly always eat healthy begins to level off (see figure 1).

We asked our respondents about healthy aging. Foods that offer a “healthy aging” benefit only interest 8% of those who express little desire to eat healthy, but rises to a quarter of those who find healthy eating somewhat important and increases to fully half of those who always try to eat healthy. Moreover, already a quarter (23%) of our youngest respondents (aged 18-24) indicate that they buy particular foods for a “healthy aging” benefit.

Healthy eating reflects an attitudinal shift away from “anything goes” and toward a recognition that we have to take care of our bodies.

Our recent investigation into healthy eating clearly demonstrates that consumer interest in eating healthy is not being fueled by concerns over declining health. Although consumers who express a strong commitment to healthy eating are the most inclined to address health conditions with their diet, having more or fewer health conditions is not what drives consumers to become healthy eaters in the first place (see figure 2).

In fact, the kinds of things consumers seek as part of healthy eating make it plain that their actual health is not what is behind the desire to eat healthy. For example, 56% of consumers responds positively to “heart health” benefit claims and specifically seeks such benefits from food, regardless of their heart health status (only 15% say they are treating heart or cardiovascular disease). Moreover, a significant portion of these same consumers could care less about related heart health benefits from food, such as lowering cholesterol (interestingly, cholesterol itself exhibits the same effect; while 46% seek a cholesterol-lowering benefit from food, only 37% say a household member has to deal with high cholesterol). The underlying motivation for seeking heart health benefits is to be good to the ol’ ticker, as part of “taking better care of myself,” rather than to address an actual health condition. Like saving for retirement, such actions are meant to prepare for the future not to solve current problems.

Understanding when and why consumers take an interest in healthy eating is the key to knowing how to stay relevant with healthy products, whether developing foods with a targeted functional benefit, creating promotions or advertising to appeal to health-conscious consumers, using in-store tactics to call out healthy food options or improving quality perceptions of existing offerings.

More Healthy Eating Trends 2009 report information>>

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