To read or not to read: The influence of nutrition labels on the judgment and choice of food products.

"Seeing that consuming a healthy diet is an important step in preventing (or limiting) overweight and obesity, it is important for health policy making to establish aids by which consumers can make more informed choices. This thesis focuses on how the information provided to consumers could help them make choices towards more healthy diets. The different nutrition labelling strategies regulated by law include the nutrition information table (which provides the nutrition properties of the food, such as the calorie, sugar, salt and fat content, but also includes the ingredient list) as well as the use of nutrition claims (statements indicating the amount of a specific nutrient in a product, such as “high in fiber”) as well as other types of claims such as Organic or Fairtrade labelling. These types of labelling are relatively new, and for example, nutrition information labelling has been mandatory only as of December 2016. Many questions remain about how these labelling strategies are truly used and understood by consumers, and how they could aid in the choice for healthier foods. Indeed, there is an increasing emphasis on understanding the consumer’s motives for choosing food. Moreover, one’s food-related personal traits likely play a moderating role in food choice. That is why this thesis focusses on how the different information labelling strategies are used and understood by consumers, and if this is impacted by different interpersonal traits, such as food-related involvement, but also numeracy and moral satisfaction. In this thesis, first two theoretical concepts that are crucial for the understanding of this work will be explained: the notion of food-related involvement and the notion of nutrition labelling. After these two theoretical chapters, the empirical research will be discussed. First a quantitative study about the nutrition information table will be discussed. Then a study on nutrition claims, and how these may impact the choice for vegetables for different levels of processing will be discussed. After this, we will discuss how other labelling strategies such as organic and Fairtrade labelling impact food choice. And finally, after these quantitative studies, we will then turn to a mixed methods study in order to understand how consumers make sense of all these different labelling strategies together, and if, when and how consumers (with different levels of food-related involvement) use and understand them."Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Label reading, numeracy and Food&Nutrition involvement.

The purpose of this study was to investigate objective performance on a nutrition label comprehension task, and the influence of numeracy and food-related involvement on this performance level. A pilot study (n = 45) was run to prepare the scales in French. For the main study (n = 101), participants provided demographic information and answered the nutrition label survey, the short numeracy scale and two different food-related involvement scales (i.e. the food involvement scale and the nutrition involvement scale). Both studies were conducted online, and consent was obtained from all participants. Participants answered correctly only two-thirds of the nutrition label task items. Numeracy and food involvement scores were positively correlated with performance on this task. Finally, food involvement interacted with numeracy. Specifically, people scoring low in numeracy performed generally more poorly on the task, but if they had high food involvement scores, their performance increased. This suggests that high food-related motivation may compensate for poor numeracy skills when dealing with nutrition labels.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Does immersion or detachment facilitate healthy eating? Comparing the effects of sensory imagery and mindful decentering on attitudes and behavior towards healthy and unhealthy food

Many people would like to reduce indulging in unhealthy foods, but find it difficult to do so. Previous research shows that individuals eat smaller portions of unhealthy hedonic food if they first imagine the sensory properties of tempting food (sensory imagery; Cornil & Chandon, 2016). Similarly, they show less preference for such food if they think about food in a detached way (decentering; Papies, Barsalou, & Custers, 2012; Papies, Pronk, Keesman, & Barsalou, 2015). Given that these two mindsets are seemingly at odds with each other, we compared them across two studies to examine their effects on the preference for (Experiment 1) and consumption of (Experiment 2) hedonic healthy and unhealthy food. Although sensory imagery and decentering had largely different effects for preferences towards healthy and unhealthy foods, they had comparable effects on the consumption of both types of foods, serving to reduce the effects of consumption in participants affected by hunger and emotional eating. These results suggest that while sensory imagery and decentering are based on different mechanisms, they produce similar results when it comes to the consumption of hedonic food, regardless of how healthy the food is.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe