Health Belief Model and Healthy Consumption: Toward an Integrated Model

Consumers have evolved from scavengers of necessity to scavengers of excess. Citizens of industrialized countries have little survival motivation to forage for food, yet a dominance of food cues in the environment exacerbates eating control. As a result, behavioral strategies are needed to mediate these negative effects. However, healthful consumption likelihood has been an extremely elusive measure to predict. Most studies are able to show only an incremental amount of variance explained in consumers’ behavioral intentions. Moreover, generalizability is often limited to college student data. In response, the present research uses structural equation modeling methods to investigate the complexity of this domain. The results from a representative panel of U.S. adult consumers show that motivation, social support, and food features all have significant effects on healthful consumption likelihood. Finally, several of these effects are mediated by the importance of healthy eating and convenience barriers. The final structural model explains 58% of the variance in healthy eating—a significant contribution to extant research.