The propensity for consumers to offset health risks through the use of functional foods and nutraceuticals

The perceived threat likelihood or vulnerability and severity of the hazard, in the context of overall fear of disease/ill-health, stimulate the individual to take coping strategies in order to protect themselves from the threat. [...] Response efficacy and self-efficacy tend to increase the likelihood of making a behavioural change, while response cost, in terms of the time and effort of mobilizing the resources required to make behavioural change, reduces the probability of reacting to a hazard. [...] For example, in the case of the scales directed at the measurement of self-efficacy, the respective items made reference to the respondent’s own behaviour in the case of men and the respondent’s partner’s behaviour in the case of women. [...] This scale had a high degree of internal reliability on the basis of the Cronbach alpha ( =0.880), perhaps reflecting a perception that the risk of contracting a range of diseases is inter-related and, due to the pervasiveness of cancer, the belief that a wide range of lifestyle factors and health issues cause cancer (Berman and Wandersman, 1990). [...] This reflects the genetic predisposition of respondents towards prostate cancer as well as their experience of prostate cancer through friends and 2 Note that instead of creating a dummy variable where we take the value above and below the median health belief state score to define values of 1 and 0, we use the scores as a continuous variable to capture the range of intensity of health status beli