Adult Women's Experiences of Health Food Industry Advertising

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between adult women's perception of healthy eating and their use of health food industry advertising as a guide to managing their food consumption. The general hypothesis was that such perception is influenced by health food industry marketing materials which may tend to emphasize health risks even to the point of contributing to the creation or maintenance of such conditions as orthorexia nervosa. Literature on health food industry advertising, disordered eating, and women's relationship to eating was reviewed. Three adult women were intensively interviewed and results indicate that they see advertising as influential, and as a contributor to food-related anxieties. Discussion emphasizes the consistency of these results with themes of guilt, control, excessive eating patterns and perfectionism found in the empirical literature.