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Commercial and marketing motivations underlie many of the people’s choices regarding food. Indeed, advertising and marketing strategies are designed to capture consumer interest and lead them to make certain choices. This influence reaches all ages, with the youngest being particularly vulnerable (Calvert, 2021). What other segments of society are more subject to this influence? This study addressed this question, outlining some characteristics of consumers who are more prone to commercial and marketing motivations. Data were collected within the scope of the EATMOT project and include responses from 11, 919 consumers to a questionnaire described in Ferrão et al. (2019). Sixteen countries are represented in this sample and seven items were used to measure commercial and marketing motivations. An exploratory factor analysis by country was performed and three items were consistently combined in one factor for all countries. The other items were studied individually. Based on these motivational variables, a cluster analysis was conducted, applying different cluster procedures and analysing the stability and interpretability of cluster solutions. Two clusters emerged, differentiated by the level of commercial and marketing motivations, namely, the Notably Motivated Consumers and the Low Motivated Consumers. These two clusters were then compared using statistical tests and logistic regression analysis. Consumers of the Notably Motivated cluster were significantly younger (32.7 vs 36.7 years old, p

The food act unfolds according to rules imposed by society, influencing food choice. These factors can encompass the environment, which is related to available resources and social relationships, as well as individual history. Thus, considering the values of the social group in which the individual is inserted, the construction of cultural identities and individual differentiation, the human eater selects the available natural resources and transforms them into food for consumption as a way to meet the needs of the individual. The project "EISuFood – Study about food habits and knowledge about edible insects as sustainable foods" was developed in different countries aiming to study the different psychic and social motivations that determine people’s eating patterns, either in relation to their choices or eating habits, particularly considering these areas: health motivations ; economic factors ; emotional aspects ; cultural influences ; marketing and commercials ; environmental concerns. The project was approved by the CI&DETS Research Centre and the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, and consisted of 18 countries, from which only 16 were successful in completing all the project specifications: Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, Romania, United States of America. The project team was composed of 74 researchers in global, and was directed by the Portuguese partner (chief: Raquel Guiné). The methodology included several tasks: 1. Undertake a questionnaire survey - Prepare a questionnaire purposely for this research ; 2. Translate the questionnaire to the native languages of all countries ; 3. Apply the questionnaire to collect data in all countries ; 4. Build a database with data from all countries ; 5. Treatment of the data (•Treatment considering all countries involved, •Treatment considering some countries, •Treatment for one country isolated). The results of the project were disclosed through different types of outputs, namely: – Publication of PAPERS in scientific peer reviewed journals – 36 papers (30 published, 2 accepted, 4 under preparation) ; – Publication of CHAPTERS in scientific books – 15 chapters published ; – Publication of BOOKS – 3 books published (1 in Portugal, 1 in Hungary, 1 in Switzerland) ; – Participation in CONFERENCES – 21 presentations (1 Invited Keynote, 13 oral communications, 7 poster presentations - 1 Best Porter Award) ; – Academic Works – 4 Works (1 Master Thesis, 3 Graduation works) ; – 1 website: https://raquelguine.wixsite.com/eatmot. In conclusion the project showed that: •Age significantly influenced the eating motivations, especially relating with health and emotions ; •Women and men have contradictory behaviours towards economic & availability and social & cultural motivations ; •The strongest factors determining health motivations were age and country ; •Emotional motivations were determined by living environment and country ; •For economic & availability motivations, the highest influential factors were gender and living environment ; •The Social & cultural motivations were highly variable with country, living environment and professional area ; •For environmental & political motivations, country had the highest influence ; •Marketing & commercial motivations were strongly determined by country and living environment

To make everyday food choices is a complex pro- cess, involving decisions which are influenced by distinct aspects associated with, among other fac- tors, purchasing ease, competitiveness of the mar- ket, advertising campaigns and marketing strategies, to mention a few related with aspects linked to com- mercialization. Hence, the objective of this study, which is integrated in the EATMOT project, was to as- sess some factors that influence food buying and food choice, in particular related with aspects such as price,convenience and marketing, as a function of some sociodemographic and geographic variables, namely, age, gender, marital status, level of education, living environment and country of residence. This study involved a questionnaire survey undertak- en on 11,960 participants from 16 countries. The in- strument used in this study was validated and trans- lated into the different languages of the participating countries, following double sided translation-checking methodology. The participants were from: Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and United States of America. The sample was selected by convenience and the partici- pation in the study was voluntary, being the question- naire applied only to adult citizens. Basic descriptive statistics were used for data analysis and the associ- ations between variables were investigated by cross- tabs and chi square tests. Additionally, a tree classifi- cation analysis was performed to assess the relative importance of each of the sociodemographic variables (gender, age group, level of education, country, living environment or marital status). The analysis followed the Classification and Regression Trees (CRT) algorithm with cross validation and the minimum number of cas- es considered for parent or child nodes was 100 and 50, respectively. For all data analysis, the software SPSS from IBM Inc. (version 25) was used and the level of sig- nificance considered was 5%. Results showed statistically significant differences (p < 0.0005) between groups for all sociodemographic vari- ables (gender, age, education, marital status, living en- vironment, country) in terms of the value attributed to convenience, price and marketing when buying foods. In most cases, the associations between the variables were considered very weak, although with a little high- er values for the associations between the country and variables “value convenience” (V = 0.179), “value price” (V = 0.158) and “value marketing” (V = 0.167). Tree clas- sification analysis confirmed for all three dependent variables that the most influential factor was country. This work highlighted that people in different coun - tries and from different sociodemographic groups show different motivations for buying food products. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Poor diets have proven very detrimental for the maintenance of a good health, and eating excessive fast food and highly processed meals can have a negative impact on the general health status of the population. Hence, this work investigated the habits related to eating out of home and frequency of eating fast food meals in participants from six different countries. A cross-sectional descriptive study was undertaken on a sample of 4904 adult participants. For the data treatment basic statistics was complemented with tree classification analysis, using CRT algorithm. This study allowed concluding that in the sample at study the frequency with which the participants ate out of home was in general low, corresponding to four or less times per week for 71.9% of the participants, and the consumption of fast food meals was also acceptable, i.e., with a low frequency of up to two times per week in 88.6% of the respondents. The biggest differences were encountered when comparing participants form different age groups, countries or sexes, and not so much for living environment or education level. Tree classification analysis highlighted the relative importance of the considered factors for eating out and fast food meals, being country and age confirmed as the most influential factors. In the evaluated sample the incidence of eating out and fast food meals was low, which is a good indicator to globally contribute for a good health status of the participants involved in the study.

Introduction: The EATMOT Project is a multinational study that is being carried out in 16 countries about different eating motivations, given their recognized importance in the definition of people’s dietary patterns. Objective: This study investigated the influence of sociodemographic factors on some types of eating motivations, specifically: health related factors; economic and availability aspects; emotional determinants; social, cultural and religious influences; marketing and advertising campaigns and finally environmental concerns. Methods: This is a longitudinal observational study carried out on a non-probabilistic sample with 11960 participants. For the analysis of the data were used the T-test for independent samples or ANOVA with Post-Hoc Tukey HSD, depending on the case. The modelling through artificial neural networks included 7 input variables (sociodemographic characteristics) and 6 output variables (the eating motivations’ groups). Results: Variables like age, marital status, country, living environment, level of education or professional area significantly influenced all the types of eating motivations analysed. However, regarding gender, no significant differences were observed for two of the six types of motivations analysed: economic & availability and marketing & commercial. The results of the ANN modelling showed that the strongest positive factors determining the eating motivations were age for health, country for emotional motivations, gender for economic & availability, country for social & cultural, country for environmental & political, and finally country also for the marketing & commercial motivations. Conclusions: These results highlight the importance of the sociodemographic characteristics as determinants for eating patterns around the globe, and particularly the geographic location. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

In the ambit of the multinational project EATMOT undertaken in 16 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and United States of America) a study was undertaken to evaluate the motivations for food choices as influenced by variables linked to sustainability. In this way aspects related with minimization of transportation and storage of food products, minimization of package or use of eco-materials, respect for animal’s rights and policies of recovery of food surplus were studied. The food sector is a very important one and greatly contributes to the pressure over the ecosystems, either because a great amount of food is produced, many times in intensive regimens, to feed humans on earth or because those foods are nowadays traded all over the world, contributing for the increase of the ecological footprint, and most especially if the transportation requires refrigeration systems. Hence, nowadays consumers may be aware of these problems and condition some of their food choices to these aspects. The research was undertaken by means of a questionnaire survey on nearly 12 thousand participants, from the 16 countries cited above. Briefly, the results indicated that, in general the concerns with environment and sustainability are important for most of the participants. Specifically, 55.2% preferably choose foods form the season and 49.15 prefer to buy local foods. About half of the participants (50.4%) opt for foods that comply with sustainable processing and packaging and the minimal usage of packaging is important to 49.1%. While a great majority, 70.7% try to avoid food waste at home, when it to comes to frequenting restaurants that do not have a recovery policy of food surplus the percentage is much lower, only 18.6%. The animal´s rights are a conditioning factor for food choice for about half of the participants, 49.8%. Still, it was observed that many of the participants did not manifest their opinion, with a percentage varying between 17.2 and 46.7%. These findings are important to understand the level of commitment of the general population around the world with sustainability factors determining their food choices and on the other hand show that there is still an important part of the population that do not take care about sustainability aspects when buying or consuming food, which something that we do several times everyday and year after year. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Introduction: Dietary fibre (DF) is recognized as healthy for long, so that health claims are allowed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) due to its proved benefits, extended but not only confined to many diseases of the gastrointestinal tract. Objective: This work intended to analyse the level of information about DF in 10 countries, situated in Europe, Africa and South America. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was undertaken through a survey based on a questionnaire of self-response applied to a sample of 6010 participants. The data were lately treated by factor and cluster analyses, including validation methodologies. Results: Factor analysis showed that ten of the twelve items used to assess the knowledge about DF could be arranged into two factors: one related to health effects (α =0.854) and the other to the sources (α =0.644). Furthermore, cluster analysis showed that the participants could be divided into three groups: 1) Good knowledge about sources and health effects of DF ; 2) Good knowledge about the sources of DF but poor knowledge about the health effects ; 3) Poor knowledge about the sources and health effects of DF. Conclusions: The results clearly allowed identifying two factors and three clusters, and the variables that most influenced cluster membership were country, living environment and level of education.

Proceedings contains 28 original research articles presented at 8th International Congress Flour – Bread ’15 and 10th Croatian Congress of Cereal Technologists Brašno – Kruh ’15

Objectives Because there is scientific evidence that an appropriate intake of dietary fibre should be part of a healthy diet, given its importance in promoting health, the present study aimed to develop and validate an instrument to evaluate the knowledge of the general population about dietary fibres. Study design The present study was a cross sectional study. Methods The methodological study of psychometric validation was conducted with 6010 participants, residing in 10 countries from three continents. The instrument is a questionnaire of self-response, aimed at collecting information on knowledge about food fibres. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was chosen as the analysis of the main components using varimax orthogonal rotation and eigenvalues greater than 1. In confirmatory factor analysis by structural equation modelling (SEM) was considered the covariance matrix and adopted the maximum likelihood estimation algorithm for parameter estimation. Results Exploratory factor analysis retained two factors. The first was called dietary fibre and promotion of health (DFPH) and included seven questions that explained 33.94% of total variance (α = 0.852). The second was named sources of dietary fibre (SDF) and included four questions that explained 22.46% of total variance (α = 0.786). The model was tested by SEM giving a final solution with four questions in each factor. This model showed a very good fit in practically all the indexes considered, except for the ratio χ2/df. The values of average variance extracted (0.458 and 0.483) demonstrate the existence of convergent validity; the results also prove the existence of discriminant validity of the factors (r2 = 0.028) and finally good internal consistency was confirmed by the values of composite reliability (0.854 and 0.787). Conclusions This study allowed validating the KADF scale, increasing the degree of confidence in the information obtained through this instrument in this and in future studies.