Determinants of food choice: The role of nudging, affective forecasting, habitual behaviour, and values

Abstract

Modern eating habits have created a tremendous burden of disease in Canada and other western countries. There is a large research literature that has investigated interventions for improving dietary health in the population, including work that focuses on rational or conscious factors (e.g., the provision of health information) and heuristic factors (e.g., social norms and priming healthier food choices). More broadly, researchers have worked to identify determinants of food choice to better understand why people select particular foods, resulting in an array of known factors that in some way predict food choice. The current research was designed to examine and compare empirically supported predictors to inform future interventions and to test a possible priming intervention in an online meal selection context that presents both healthy and unhealthy meal options to participants. Participants were exposed to one of two primes, or a control condition, and then made either a whole or processed food meal selection. Participants also rated their affect towards the foods and completed questionnaires that measured food choice values and meanings, habitual behaviour, typical meal sources, and demographics. Results indicated that affect ratings and familiarity were the strongest predictors of food choice, although other meanings and values, such as health values and habitual behaviours were also important. Priming did not influence meal selection in the current study. The current results suggest that interventions focusing on developing positive feelings, familiarity, and habitual behaviour towards healthy whole foods are likely to be more successful than interventions focusing on rational factors; however, values and meanings were also statistically significant predictors of whole food meal selections and may also be useful for improving food choice.