Abstract
Food/nutrition related views, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors were investigated for three hundred randomly selected men and women, aged 20-60 years, residing in Seoul metropolitan area. Food/nutrition views, attitudes, and beliefs were found to vary greatly between groups of different age, sex, education and income level. Adults of 20-35 years of age showed significantly less strong views about keeping traditional food habits, while exhibiting a significantly high level of acceptance towards the use of convenience foods as compared to the adults aged 36 years or older. Food safety was found to be a major concern to most of the subjects accounting 69.7% for pesticides residues in fresh produce items, 94.7% for food additives in processed food, and 56.3% for food poisoning in foods eaten outside of the home. Male adults aged 45 years or older showed a strong tendency to rely on a few promotional food products for the maintenance of their health and for them the development and implementation of a sensible feed nutritin/health education program including a way to avoid nutrition quackery might be beneficial. Eighty percent of the subjects were found to read food labels with higher rates shown among young adults and females. Due to the virtual absence of nutrition labeling however, the percentage of subjects who idicated that they are looking for the information on nutrient content was low (<10%) compared to the rates for other informations such as date of manufacture(80.2%), expiration data(55.8%), ingredients(40.9), and additives(40.9%). Ninety one percent of the subjects indicated that they would like to see the sources for nutrition label the nutritional value of the foods. The top five most frequently (68.3%), food packages(50.7%), and radio(43.3%). Health professionals such as physicians, nurses, and nutritionists/dietitians were utilized less frequently as sources of nutrition information than lay sources, with reported rate of only 38%, 22%, and 0.7%, respectively. These results collectively suggest that strategies are to be developed to provide accurate nutrition information to adults.
