Health claims unpacked: a toolkit to enhance the communication of health claims for food

Li, X; Liang, H; Liu, Z

doi:10.1145/3459637.3481984

Health claims unpacked: a toolkit to enhance the communication of health claims for food

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Huizhi Liang

Downloads

Accepted version [.pdf]

Licence

This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a conference proceedings (inc. abstract) that has been published in its final definitive form by ACM, 2021.

For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.

Abstract

Health claims are sentences on the food product packages to claim the nutrition and the benefits of the nutrition. Consumers in different European contexts often have difficulties understanding health claims, leading to increased confusion about and decreased trust in the food they buy. Focusing on this problem, we develop a toolkit for improving the communication of health claim for consumers. The toolkit provides (1) interactive activities to disseminate knowledge about health claims to the public, and (2) an NLP-based analysis and prediction engine that food manufacturers can use to estimate how consumers like the health claims that the manufacturers created. By using the AI-powered toolkit, consumers, manufacturers, and food safety regulators are engaged in determining the different linguistic and cultural barriers to the effective communication of health claims and formulating solutions that can be implemented on multiple levels, including regulation, enforcement, marketing, and consumer education.