According to research conducted by Washington, D.C., based International Food Information Council (IFIC), five macro trends are influencing consumer attitudes toward health. Laurie Demeritt of IFIC provided an overview of these findings at the Food Marketing Institute's (FMI) 2012 Health and Wellness Conference, held in April in Orlando, Fla. Terms such as "vitality,” "taking care," "preventive," "indulgence," "experience" and "fun" represent what "wellness" now means to consumers and is identified by IFIC as the first macro trend:
Wellness now represents quality of life.This differs from that of the past, where wellness was viewed as "perfunctory” and linked to avoiding the negative, such as "illness," "crisis," "treatment," "quick fix," "reactive," "have to" and "boring." Of note, consumers have a vision for how they want to live and even what they do not want life to be like.