Health Concerns Fade as Economy Worsens

(MoneyWatch)  Good news, junk-food peddlers: as the economy sinks, people are buying fewer (pardon the term) "wellness" products.

As reported by Food Processing, a study from Faith Popcorn's firm BrainReserve has found a sharp drop in demand for organic products ?€" more than half of consumers surveyed say they are buying fewer of them. Nearly half say they are eating less healthfully, and nearly half say they are spending less on health-and-wellness products and services overall.

(I would link to BrainReserve, but the site is built, for some misguided reason, entirely on Flash, so individual pages cannot be linked to. If you want to wait around for pages to load and to take on the challenge of finding the right page, point your browser at faithpopcorn.com.)

"There's very little that's safe in commerce today, beyond value channels and value brands in staple categories," Popcorn said.

And many of those value brands are less healthy. Sadly, healthier foods generally carry a bigger markup.

And there's another trend that's related to the economy, but not necessarily related to saving money: some people are out for what BrainReserve calls "pleasure revenge." That is, they believe that if the world is going to hell, why worry about the future? More than a third of respondents indicated they feel this way. Which could be good news not only for junk-food purveyors, but also the tobacco and liquor industries.

Cheers.