How a food scanner app influences healthy food choice.

The use of mobile applications to assist with food decision making has increased significantly. Although food scanner applications provide nutritional information to consumers in the marketplace, little is known about their effects on users' intentions and behavior. This research investigates whether a mobile food scanner app can influence consumers toward healthier food choices. Four studies tested whether information displayed through a food scanner app (as opposed to no information or front-of-packaging label information) influenced purchase intentions for food products (Studies 1-3) or led consumers to make healthier food choices (Study 4). Application-provided information enhanced hypothetical choice and purchase intentions of healthy products in comparison no information, but it did not influence real behavior when participants made choices in an experimental supermarket. Information provided through a food scanner app was systematically outperformed by front-of-packaging label information.

Nostalgia makes people eat healthier.

Nostalgia is a prominently used emotion in marketing. This work adds to the burgeoning literature on how feelings of nostalgia influence consumption behavior by investigating how nostalgia influences eating attitudes and behaviors. Two experiments showed that people consumed more and reported more favorable attitudes towards healthy food when feeling nostalgic (versus neutral). Nostalgia also diminished the consumption of unhealthy food. Process evidence revealed that nostalgia's differential influence on the consumption of healthy and unhealthy foods is due to increased perceptions of social support. Since perceptions of social support increase self-control resources, individuals were better able to make healthier food choices when in a nostalgic (versus neutral) state. The findings provided behavioral evidence that nostalgia positively influences healthy eating attitudes and behavior, and established perceived social support as an important mechanism underlying these effects. This work suggests that nostalgia can be a useful tool not only in our commercial marketing efforts, but also in public policy, in that it can help promote healthy food intake and well-being.

Distinguishing the affective and cognitive bases of implicit attitudes to improve prediction of food choices.

Eating behaviors largely result from automatic processes. Yet, in existing research, automatic or implicit attitudes toward food often fail to predict eating behaviors. Applying findings in cognitive neuroscience research, we propose and find that a central reason why implicit attitudes toward food are not good predictors of eating behaviors is that implicit attitudes are driven by two distinct constructs that often have diverging evaluative consequences: the automatic affective reactions to food (e.g., tastiness; the affective basis of implicit attitudes) and the automatic cognitive reactions to food (e.g., healthiness; the cognitive basis of implicit attitudes). More importantly, we find that the affective and cognitive bases of implicit attitudes directly and uniquely influence actual food choices under different conditions. While the affective basis of implicit attitude is the main driver of food choices, it is the only driver when cognitive resources during choice are limited. The cognitive basis of implicit attitudes uniquely influences food choices when cognitive resources during choice are plentiful but only for participants low in impulsivity. Researchers interested in automatic processes in eating behaviors could thus benefit by distinguishing between the affective and cognitive bases of implicit attitudes.

Just thinking about exercise makes me serve more food. Physical activity and calorie compensation.

Based on the findings demonstrating compensation between mental effort and subsequent food consumption, this article focuses on the compensatory mechanism between thinking about physical activity and food intake. Results from a field experiment indicate that simply reading about physical activity leads participants to compensate by serving themselves more snacks. The amount of snacks served was mediated by biased calorie estimation. Additionally, we also manipulated the way physical activity was perceived (as tiring exercise or as a fun activity). Although results suggest extra consumption when exercise is perceived as tiring, differences were not statistically significant.