Women were recruited from a larger community using a subject pool drawn
from a dietary health study in Tainan City (the second largest city in southern
Taiwan) that was administered through the Southern Taiwan University. The
current experiment focused on young adult women because a cross-sectional
population-based telephone survey of health behaviors from September 2002
to December 2002 (N ¼ 9403) showed that women ages 18 to 34 y were most
likely to use supplements compared with other age and gender groups [4]. The
study sample consisted of 70 participants (mean 28.16 y, SD ¼ 5.69) who
intended to lose weight. Twelve candidate participants who did not meet the
study criteria (i.e., no history of allergies to dietary supplements, no current
psychopathology, no behavior that would prevent them from consuming dietary
supplements, and having an intention to lose weight) were excluded. This study
was approved by the ethical board of the National Sun Yat-sen University.