Can Consumers Interpret Nutrition Information in the Presence of a Health Claim? A Laboratory Investigation Gary T. Ford, Manoj Hastak, Anusree Mitra, and Debra Jones Ringold The authors report the results of a laboratory experiment that investigates whether consumers can evaluate nutrition information in the presence of a health claim. Results show that both health claims and nutrition information influence beliefs about product healthfulness. However; health claims do not influence the processing of nutrition information on a food label. Rather; health claims and nutrition information have independent effects on consumer beliefs. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the Food and Drug Administration policy on limiting health claims. S ince 1984, when Kellogg's first advertised the rela- tionship between consumption of fiber and the pre- vention of some forms of cancer, health claims have become commonplace on food packages and in food adver- tising. Although some observers applaud the benefits of such claims for increasing consumer awareness of diet-dis- ease relationships and for product improvements on dimen- sions relevant to disease (Calfee 1991; Ippolito and Mathios 1989, 1990a, b, 1991), others believe that consumers are being harmed by health claims that are incomplete, stress trivial differences among products, or are misleading in other ways (Silverglade 1991). Because of concern that consumers were being misled by health claims, in 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition La- beling and Education Act (21 U.S.c. 301). Consequently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued new rules, effective May 1994, which strictly limit health claims on food packages. In these rules, if the amounts of total fat, sat- urated fat, cholesterol, or sodium exceed the FDA-specified thresholds, no health claim may be made. The FDA has con- cluded that if the food has high levels of total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, or sodium, any health claim is contradicted and is therefore misleading. For example, according to the FDA, a low cholesterol food is prohibited from making the health claim "good for the heart" if the food is high in sodi- um, saturated fat, or total fat. GARY T. FORD is Professor of Marketing, MANOJ HASTAK is Asso- ciate Professor of Marketing, and ANUSREE MITRA is Assistant Pro- fessor of Marketing, Kogod College of Business Administration, The American University. DEBRA JONES RINGOLD is Associate Pro- fessor of Marketing, Atkinson Graduate School of Management, Willamette University. Order of authorship is alphabetical; all au- thors contributed equally to the paper. The authors thank Alan Levy, Janis Pappalardo, Michael Mazis, and the participants at the workshop at the Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade Commission, for their helpful comments and suggestions. The authors also thank Debra Scammon and four anonymous reviewers for their valuable assistance. Thanks are also given to Pablo Biggs for his assistance in developing the stimuli used in the study. This research was par- tially supported by a research grant from the American University to Anusree Mitra. This approach for regulating health claims could be justi- fied on the basis of one or more of the following three as- sumptions. First, consumers may lack the competence to comprehend nutrition information on the product label (Le., they may not understand whether eight grams of fat in a prod- uct is low or high). Second, health claims may influence con- sumers' processing of nutrition information on the product label even if they have the ability to understand nutrition in- formation. Third, consumers may decide to rely solely on the health claim and ignore the nutrition information altogether. Although prior research (Levy, Fein, and Schucker 1992) has provided some evidence that consumers can compre- hend nutrition information on a product label (i.e., the first assumption), no research to date has examined the second and third assumptions. We here evaluate whether health claims influence consumers' interpretation of detailed nutri- tion information on food labels. In so doing, we directly test the second assumption and indirectly examine the first. We subsequently describe in more detail the FDA approach to regulating health claims and consider its likely effect on consumers. This section is followed by one describing the theoretical considerations underlying our study. Likely Effects of the FDA Policy for Regulating Health Claims The FDA disqualifying levels are designed to protect con- sumers from harm that might accrue from purchasing prod- ucts on the basis of particular characteristics (e.g., no cholesterol) that may reduce the risk of a disease without si- multaneously considering other characteristics (e.g., high levels of fat and sodium) that may increase the risk of the same or another disease. The FDA has specified levels of total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, or sodium above which foods are disqualified from making a health claim. At- tributes that exceed the disqualifying levels have been inter- preted as contradicting any health claim, because such lev- els have been determined by the FDA to increase "the risk of a disease or health-related condition" (Federal Register 1993, p. 2491) for people in the general population. Manu- facturers are thus prohibited from making an otherwise per- missible health claim if any of the four disqualifying quan- 16 Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Vol. 15 (1) Spring 1996. /6-27