Contact:
Kara Davis Cosby, [email protected]
Amelia Steiner, [email protected]
Alison Esser, [email protected] 202/296-6540
April 1998, WASHINGTON, DC--News stories about food and health bombard us daily. Whether we're watching the evening news at home, flipping through a newspaper or reading magazine headlines while in the grocery store checkout line, we stumble upon the latest food study. But what are consumers actually hearing and reading from media sources? That's what the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation revealed in a new quantitative and qualitative study that analyzed three months of coverage (May-July 1997) in 38 national and regional television, newspaper and magazine outlets.
Consumers may not be receiving all the details necessary to make informed decisions about food and health. Just as the IFIC Foundation found in a similar 1995 study, information such as how much of a particular food to eat, how often and who should adopt the advice was often lacking. Only 30 percent of stories about the beneficial or harmful associations of food mentioned any one contextual element. "Consumers are hampered more by missing information than misinformation," said Sylvia Rowe, president of the IFIC Foundation. "However, we are quite pleased to find that medical/health reporters seem to be leading the way, providing critical contextual elements in 84 percent of their stories."
Scientists were more prominent as expert sources, even though the number of new studies reported fell. Sharon M. Friedman, M.A., Director of the Science and Environmental Writing Program, Lehigh University, commented: "Going to the most knowledgeable source, which frequently means an academic researcher, shows a more responsible effort by journalists."
During the three months studied, food safety rocketed to the top of topics discussed, but dietary fat was still the #1 nutrition topic. Functional foods--foods that provide health benefits beyond nutrition--also made their mark as a one of the most reported topics.
The full report, "Food For Thought II," is available from the IFIC Foundation, and the executive summary is on-line at http://ificinfo.health.org/press/FdThghtT.htm. The research was conducted for the IFIC Foundation by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a non-profit, non-partisan organization in Washington, DC.
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