At the midst of the worldwide crisis regarding the obesity epidemic, all fields of science (even different social studies) join forces in the research to improve the health of those who suffer from this disease - and now, a new study deploys the theory that maybe food choice psychology has been leading scientists to entice healthy eating wrong.
The new study regarding the food choice psychology tackles long-standing issues regarding how to teach people to embrace healthy eating habits, among other factors such as weight stigma, how to encourage healthy choices and teaching young people (such as children and teenagers) to eat better.
Science Daily reports that the new study on food choice psychology comes from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, in a recent symposium in Long Beach, California, entitled "Challenging Misconceptions About the Psychology of Food Choice," where four different papers on the subject were ultimately exposed, including one published on JAMA called "Photographs in Lunch Tray Compartments and Vegetable Consumption Among Children in Elementary School Cafeterias."
According to Science 20, the food choice psychology paper's experiment went as follows: the researchers observed whether the photographs of different vegetables on a school tray ended up having any impact whatsoever in the amount of vegetables ultimately consumed.
Ultimately, things didn't go that well: placing pictures of vegetables such as green beans and carrots did have a mild effect in increasing how many vegetables those exposed ended up eating at lunch, but the difference wasn't strong enough and it was still below the recommended dietary guidelines.
As Eureka Alert reports, the food choice psychology study mostly focused on how to entice the children towards better eating. For example, the study suggests that, when a child is hungry, they should be offered vegetables before any other option; in the meantime, with teenagers (who are notorious for their disregard for healthy eating), programs should aim to relate vegetables to things they already care about.
Another issue tackled in the food choice psychology study was the fact that overweight and obese individuals are usually portrayed negatively in healthy eating campaigns, which ironically causes impairment in regulating consumption of meals as the subjects fall into different types of depression.
