Modelling nutrition knowledge, attitudes, and diet-disease awareness: the case of dietary fibre

Understanding how nutrition knowledge and attitudes vary across different population groups is critical for designing and evaluating nutrition education programmes and monitoring the nation's progress toward dietary goals. In this paper we use the Diet and Health Knowledge component of the USDA Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals to examine consumer knowledge of dietary fibre, fibre consumption attitudes and the awareness of fibre-related health problems. We use a latent variable probit model to estimate the relationships between an individuals's socio-demographic characteristics and his or her fibre knowledge, attitude and disease-awareness. The results suggest that the demographic profile of persons least knowledgeable about the fibre content of foods is low income, male, Black, Hispanic, smoker and low education levels. Add to this list younger individuals and one has a good description of those who lack information on the importance of eating plenty of grain products as well as those who lack awareness of fibre/disease links. The research suggests that messages about increasing fibre intake may have greatest success when targeted to individuals with some or all of these characteristics.