Network Anchor: “Turning now to our favorite news subject, FOOD! What’s going on?”
In a word—Obesity!
According to new research commissioned by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation, the issue of obesity and weight management shot to the top of the charts in food reporting in 2003. The Food For Thought V study also discovered that issues related to functional foods, dietary fat, and disease risk reduction were top-of-mind for journalists who cover food safety and nutrition. This latest look at food in the news also found that many stories provide insufficient context for people to make important decisions with regard to their health.
Food For Thought V is the fifth in an ongoing series of quantitative and qualitative analyses which now stretch back nine years to form one of the longest-ranging and most comprehensive research projects of its kind. The surveys, carried out by the Washington, DC-based Center for Media and Public Affairs, offer biannual snapshots of what consumers are hearing and reading about food and nutrition. Taken as a whole, the surveys can provide insight into long-term trends in the coverage of food stories.
During a three-month research period (May through July) in 2003, the Center monitored 40 major national and regional outlets, including five Internet sites that originate news. The Food For Thought V survey sample included a cross section of national and local daily newspapers, network and local television news, newswire services, and monthly magazines, in addition to the media Web sites. Altogether, 1,215 news reports on food safety and nutrition topics were analyzed in the news vehicles surveyed.
Cooking Up Better Health
So what have researchers found out?
Over the course of the five Food For Thought surveys, researchers have observed several trends in media coverage of food issues, and all with the same theme, diet and health:
- Obesity tops the charts—Obesity and weight management has become the most popular food issue in the media, accounting for nearly one of every six stories monitored in the 2003 survey.
- Functional food stories more complete—Functional food coverage has become more comprehensive, incorporating discussions of specific compounds with general dietary advice.
- Dietary fat's back in the pan—News coverage of dietary fats is up and has morphed into more detailed discussions of the various types of fats, specifically trans fatty acids.
- Getting healthy still the goal—health promotion as a goal of sound nutrition continues to be an important part of coverage.
- But what does it all mean?—A consistent feature of news about food over the five Food For Thought studies has been a lack of context in the reporting of food news, an absence of perspective necessary for consumers to actually make use of the information.
Obesity News Hits the Top of the Coverage Charts
Although several major trends in coverage have emerged since the initial survey, perhaps the most dramatic is the explosion of obesity-related news stories. News focused on overweight and obesity made up only 5 percent of the coverage tracked just two years earlier in 2001. Food For Thought V documents a more than tripling of media interest in the issue since then.
Previous Food For Thought surveys first began to see pronounced media attention to the issue of weight management in the 1999 survey—at that time, overweight was presented in the context of nutrition news. Still, in that study and in the following survey in 2001, concerns about overweight and obesity accounted for one in twenty of all news discussions dealing with harms and benefits linked to dietary choices. Some aspects of obesity coverage were not fully accounted for until the latest survey, when the true complexity of the issue became clear: news reports dealing with obesity as a health issue and reports mentioning such possible causes as genetics or lack of physical activity were added to the 2003 research, in order to better track what has become a multi-faceted social phenomenon.
Functional Food Reporting Gains Depth
Stories about functional foods are a prominent part of food news (11 percent) and coverage of this issue was more detailed and specific in 2003 than it has been in the past. Food For Thought V found that the amount of news coverage about functional foods-foods or food components that may have health benefits beyond basic nutrition—decreased in 2003 from its high in 2001, but the reporting tended to be more comprehensive in the latest research.
Early Food For Thought surveys found that media reports tended to focus on specific foods—soybeans, garlic, red wine, and others—which were said to contain functional components, or on general dietary advice such as “eat more vegetables.” Then, the 1999 and 2001 surveys found increasing discussion of specific functional components in foods—such as lutein, isoflavones, lycopene, omega-3 fatty acids, and others.
Media coverage in 2003 tended to combine these two approaches. Although many reports continued to discuss specific compounds thought to have health benefits, general dietary advice and discussions of specific foods that contain those components took on a more dominant role. This new approach to functional food news couples reports of general health benefits with more scientific information and explanation.
In 2003, 43 percent of benefit claims in the media referenced some type of functional component, compared with the 2001 high of 63 percent.
Dietary Fats Hit the Pan—Again
Eight percent of food and health media coverage in 2003 was related to dietary fats, reversing a long-term decline in fats coverage and doubling the amount of coverage from 2001. This increase comes on the heels of changes in government regulation relating to trans fat, and increased attention to the functional benefits of some fatty acids.
Similar to changes in functional food coverage, reporting on dietary fats has become more detailed over the course of the Food For Thought surveys. Earlier surveys found that media coverage tended to focus on lowering fat intake or on the negative impact of high-fat diets. Reporting in 2003, however, was inclined to be much more complex, discussing trans fats, saturated fats, unsaturated fats, and omega-3 fatty acids issues.
This more detailed approach differentiates between types of dietary fats and identifies types that might actually be beneficial. In doing so, media coverage of dietary fats in 2003 showed a tendency to provide more science-based dietary advice than was evident in earlier surveys.
Where’s the Perspective?
Perhaps the most consistent finding throughout the entire nine-year Food For Thought research period is the dearth of context offered in food news. Despite the literally thousands of stories that have been monitored by this study since 1995, surprisingly little concerning the meaning of all that news has been written or broadcast. Scientific studies on food components or dietary practices are not conducted in a vacuum—they are designed to offer insight into what foods we ought to be eating. It is surprising, therefore, that the Food For Thought surveys observed little of the kind of information that consumers might need to make decisions about what they eat.
For example, in the 2003 study, when a food or dietary choice was linked in a news story to a specific harm or benefit, only 13 percent of the stories mentioned how much should be eaten—or how often it should be eaten. Only 17 percent of the stories spelled out what group of consumers might benefit or be harmed from the food or dietary choice mentioned in the report. Only two percent of the food news monitored detailed the cumulative effect of a food component or dietary choice. Twenty-one percent of the news stories captured in the 2003 study cited scientific evidence as the source of the report. These percentages have varied somewhat over the 9-year course of the tracking survey, but they have remained consistently low.
When you consider that it is the context around nutrition information that makes it actionable, the absence of this kind of “background” becomes all the more important. To some extent, the explanation for this state of affairs is fairly obvious: expanding news schedules (even to a 24-hour news cycle in cable and Internet media outlets), fiercer competition among reporters for space or airtime, and in some cases, dwindling news staffs have put increasing pressure on reports to be short and succinct. Still, as the Food For Thought 2003 reports: a “minimal standard for context could be met in even the briefest of reports. For example, Men’s Health offered this advice on menu planning: ‘Two to four servings of tomato sauce a week can cut your prostate cancer risk by 34 percent.’ This single sentence provides information on amount (2-4 servings) and frequency (weekly).”
If advances in food science are to have a beneficial effect on real people’s lives, news consumers must be able not only to understand these advances but also to put into effect whatever dietary recommendations emerge. Food scientists, dietitians, health professionals, and journalists will face an ever more crucial challenge to translate increasingly complex emerging science into useable information. The Food For Thought research offers a glimpse at the communications road ahead.
