Consumption of Functional Foods in Terms of Variety and Frequency

Abstract

To effectively promote family health, it is important to understand how women see functional foods and nutraceuticals. The goals of this research are to provide nutrition education using visual and audio-visual aids, and to determine the level of awareness of functional foods and nutraceuticals among college-educated working women. Although the functional food sector has grown, there has been little study on how consumers see these products. Age-related health problems make older folks a potential market demographic for functional foods. The purpose of this paper was to collect data on functional food intake among older persons (>60 years old, n=200) living in the community. As a post-test result of the education campaign, the percentage of people increasing their weekly consumption of soy goods from 30% to 50%, cauliflower group from 20% to 66.7%, cocoa products from 20% to 46.7%, almonds from 13.3% to 30%, amla from 13.3% to 36.7%, fish & fish oil from 0% to 36.7%, and aloevera from 3.3% to 56.7%. The average monthly consumption of soy products, fish, and fish oil both increased. A review of the numbers showed that the awareness project had a beneficial effect on the consumption of the Functional Foods categories.

Keywords Consumption, Functional food, Awareness, Food science