The Calcium Quandary: How Consumers use Nutrition Labels

patient has just left her physician's office after a rou- tine annual exam, during which she is given a clean bill of health. Feeling good, and possibly relieved, she vows to follow her doctor's recommendation: exercise at least 30 minutes three times a week and get 1200-1500 mil- ligrams of calcium every day. Determined to begin right away, she goes to the local grocery to purchase a container of yogurt. The Nutrition Facts panel indicates that the yogurt provides 45% DV (daily value), which she thinks is a fairly good amount of calcium, but how many milligrams of cal- cium does this represent? How does this consumption choice contribute to reaching her doctor-prescribed goal of 1200-1500 milligrams per day? We invite readers to refer to Figure 1 and to try to perform this calculation before read- ing further. This scenario represents an underresearched area in con- sumer decision making: How do consumers make food con- sumption decisions when product information falls short of providing the nutritional knowledge needed for personal health consumption goals? Our research explores how con- sumers interpret the percent daily value (%DV) information on the Nutrition Facts panel of food labels to determine their calcium consumption. One reason we chose to explore calcium in this research is the prevalence of osteoporosis in the United States. According to the National Osteoporosis Foundation, ten million Americans, both male and female, have osteoporosis, and an estimated 34 million more have low bone density. The National Osteoporosis Foundation estimates that one in two women and one in four men over the age of 50 will have an osteoporosis-related fracture, at a