Supplement Usage Status and Risk Information

Dietary supplements are a ubiquitous part of consumers’ healthy lifestyle (Wang, Keh, and Bolton 2010). Despite their popularity, there is mixed evidence that supplements improve health. Indeed, it is increasingly common for consumers to encounter risk information about the safety of supplement use. For example, a CNN report cites medical studies suggesting that taking supplements such as Vitamin E could harm users in the long term (Cohen 2009). Moreover, supplement users often discount scientific evidence about harmful side effects, which in turn can make them vulnerable to maladaptive behaviors such as self-medicating and overdosing on supplements (Blendon et al. 2001; Block and Peracchio 2006). Hence, from a health marketing as well as public policy perspective, it is imperative to better understand the underlying processes that might drive responses to risk information among different supplement user segments.