Does Targeting Healthy Food Labels to Populations at High Risk of Diet-Related Diseases Increase Label Effectiveness?

The decades-long increase in obesity in the U.S. has inspired multiple policies aiming to improve individuals’ food choices, which play an important role in diet-related diseases. Early policies—which have continued to be implemented and refined—took the view that providing consumers with information would give them the tools needed to choose a healthy diet. Both nutrition facts panels, which are provided on the side or back of nearly all packaged food products in the U.S, and calorie labeling in restaurant chains with 20 or more locations seek to address a lack of information among consumers. While nutrition information is a necessary ingredient for people to choose healthier diets, studies of the effects of both policies show little effect on individuals’ food choices. Part of this null effect may be due to the cost of searching for this information. Recently, efforts to make nutritional information easier for consumers to use in the retail environment have led to the creation of simple shelfbased or front-of-package labels. Simplified nutrition information included on front-of-pack or shelf-based labels shows more promise by making it easier for consumers who face cognitive or time constraints in the store to access and process nutrition information. While average obesity rates have risen significantly in the U.S, these averages mask important differences in obesity rates, which correlate with demographic and socioeconomic variables, including race, income, and place of residence. On average, minority, rural, and poorer households have higher body mass index (BMI) values, which are used to define weight categories such as overweight and obese than the general population. Although these groups are at higher risk of obesity-related diseases than the general population, research on shelf-based and front -of-pack labels has examined the effects of these labels in the general population. To effectively address the obesity epidemic, designing informational systems tailored to people who are at high risk for obesity-related diseases is important

Intertemporal Preferences or (In)Attention to Future Costs: Identifying Factors Influencing Variation in Health Behaviors

When you have the urge to buy a fancy coffee drink at your favorite coffee place, do you think about alternative future uses of the money that you would spend on the drink? If, in the end, you decide to forego buying the drink to save money, you have, by definition, considered what you are giving up now—the drink—in order to have the money later, but many people may not consider the future opportunities they forego when they make decisions now. Research suggests that this asymmetric attention to immediate versus future opportunity costs— the benefits that we give up when we make a choice, such as the drink we don’t get so that we can save money, or the thing we could have purchased in the future if we do buy the drink—is common even in decision contexts frequently used in research to study how people discount future vs. immediate benefits

Evaluating the relative impact of multiple healthy food choice interventions on choice process variables and choices

Fiscal tools—taxes and/or subsidies—are increasingly used to address diet-related health problems. However, some studies have found that these tools are markedly more effective if attention is drawn to the tax or subsidy, suggesting that the price change alone may go unnoticed in the complex food environments that consumers face. Interventions that prompt individuals to consider health during choice show promise for promoting healthy food choices in both simple laboratory settings and complex, real-world markets. In this pre-registered study, I examine the impact of dietary fiber health prompts and/or dietary fiber subsidies on the per-serving fiber content of foods chosen, the documented set of products considered, and (self-reported) nutrition information use by participants in an online supermarket setting. Participants were randomized to one of four conditions: 1) control, 2) subsidy, 3) fiber prompt, and 4) fiber prompt + subsidy. Results show that both the prompt and prompt + subsidy conditions significantly increase fiber content of foods chosen (with the latter having a larger effect). While all three interventions influence the probability of using nutrition information during food choice and affect the set of products that respondents consider relative to the control condition, the effects were larger for the prompt and prompt + subsidy conditions. A multiple mediation analysis illustrates that both direct and indirect (through the set of products considered and the use of fiber information during choice) pathways lead to the significant overall increase in fiber content of selected foods. Supplementary materials attached below

Point-of-Purchase Efforts to Increase Healthy Food Choice

The prevalence of overweight and obesity in the U.S. population has increased steadily over the past four decades, impacting health, livelihoods, and quality of life. Recent estimates of U.S. adult and childhood overweight and obesity rates suggest that nearly 35 percent of adults are obese and another 34 percent are overweight, while 17 percent of children are obese and 15 percent overweight. Obesity is associated with a number of negative consequences that impact both the individual and society. These consequences include poorer health, an increased risk of associated non-communicable diseases, such as type-2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, and heart disease, and reduced quality of life operating through a variety of channels, including decreased physical function, social stigma, reduced self-esteem and increased rates of depression. Additionally, increasing rates of obesity lead to direct and indirect economic costs, such as higher health care costs, and other negative economic impacts, like increased absenteeism and presenteeism— reduced productivity when people are at work

Point-of-Purchase Efforts to Increase Healthy Food Choice

The prevalence of overweight and obesity in the U.S. population has increased steadily over the past four decades, impacting health, livelihoods, and quality of life. Recent estimates of U.S. adult and childhood overweight and obesity rates suggest that nearly 35 percent of adults are obese and another 34 percent are overweight, while 17 percent of children are obese and 15 percent overweight. Obesity is associated with a number of negative consequences that impact both the individual and society. These consequences include poorer health, an increased risk of associated non-communicable diseases, such as type-2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, and heart disease, and reduced quality of life operating through a variety of channels, including decreased physical function, social stigma, reduced self-esteem and increased rates of depression. Additionally, increasing rates of obesity lead to direct and indirect economic costs, such as higher health care costs, and other negative economic impacts, like increased absenteeism and presenteeism— reduced productivity when people are at work

Point-of-Decision Prompts and Cognitive Resources

Many of us have long-term goals to maintain or achieve a healthy body weight. However, most of us have a hard time following through on these plans. Maintaining a healthy body weight requires constant consideration of the future consequences of our current actions, which are shaped by our immediate desires, such as eating the tasty-looking brownie at the coffee shop or relaxing after a long day of work instead of forcing ourselves to go to the gym. The difficulty in balancing short-term and long-term goals is reflected in the change in the average American body type over the past five decades. Since the 1960s, the percentage of Americans who are overweight or obese has increased markedly. Currently, around 70 percent of adults in the United States are overweight or obese

Why Do People Follow Popular, or \u3ci\u3eFad\u3c/i\u3e, Diets?

The tradition of goal setting at the start of a year—New Year’s resolutions—is deeply engrained in American society: estimates suggest that between 40 and 50% of adults set New Year’s Resolutions. Many of the most common goals relate to weight management—initiating exercise programs, dieting, or both—which is perhaps unsurprising since over 70% of American adults are overweight or obese

Active Consideration of Future Health Can Be Prompted by Simple Health Messages and Improves Nutritional Quality of Food Choices

Many choices that people face daily have implications for future health and well-being. Choices about what foods to purchase and consume are one of the most frequent—and universal choices—that people must make. The ongoing rise of overweight and obesity rates—and associated diet-related diseases—in the US and many other countries illustrates the future health consequences of low-quality dietary choices. While a large body of research shows that individuals with a tendency to consider the future make a wide range of healthier decisions, research on limited attention and exogenous factors influencing choice suggests that attention to the future consequences of choices may vary from one choice scenario to the next. In this research, we examine the impact of active consideration of future health impacts during a hypothetical online food choice experiment on the nutritional quality of food choices and on choice process variables—the set of products people choose to select from and the use of nutrition information during choice—during an online food choice task. Next, we examine the impact of exposure to a shortmessage about the health benefits of fiber on consideration of future health impacts and on the nutritional quality of choices. We find that active consideration of future health impacts significantly improves the nutritional quality of choices—particularly among processed food products—and makes people more likely to pay attention to healthy foods and use nutrition information. Exposure to a short health message significantly increases the likelihood that individuals consider future health impacts during choice, which promotes healthier choices overall

Could Information About Honey Fraud Increase Consumers’ Valuation of Domestic Honey in the Face of Rising Honey Imports in the U.S. and EU?

The consumption of honey, which has been sought out by humans for use as food and medicine for thousands of years, has been increasing in recent decades with rising incomes and attention paid to food choices and health. In two decades, honey consumption in the U.S. has risen from 1.2 pound per capita per year to 1.9 in 2021. In the European Union, per capita consumption rose from 1.5 to 2.1 pounds per capita over the same period. While this might appear to be a boon for U.S. and EU beekeepers, honey is a heavily traded product, and imports from large producers such as Argentina, China, Brazil, or India have captured much of the demand growth on U.S. and European honey markets. The two regions are now the two largest importers of honey globally, with 20% of all traded honey going to the U.S. and 40% to the EU, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s trade data for 2015-2020. The figures below show that imported quantities have grown to surpass domestic production in both regions. In the United States, from where exports are small, over 60% of honey available for consumption is imported. Trade and production figures in value terms confirm the growing presence of imports in the two markets but also reflect the fact that imports are more often used in manufactured products and fetch lower prices than domestic honeys on average. International trade increases the variety of products available and lowers the prices for consumer products. However, for certain food items, including honey, consumers face a risk that imported products have been purposefully adulterated—predominantly with low-cost alternative sweeteners—and/or mislabeled

Per-ingredient Calorie Information Reduces Calories Ordered More in a Food-Away-from-Home Setting than Information Provided per

Obesity rates in the United States have risen dramatically over the past five decades, reaching what many public health officials have referred to as epidemic proportions. A common policy response to this obesity epidemic—which is often attributed to overconsumption of highly caloric, unhealthy foods—has been to increase consumers’ access to nutrition information to help them to make healthier choices. Recently, the increasing frequency of food consumption at restaurants led to the development of nutrition labeling requirements for restaurants with 20 or more locations. The rule, requiring food retailers to post calorie amounts and to make available information about other nutrients upon request, went into effect on May 7, 2018. While this does not provide enough time for widely available evidence on the effect of this newly available information, some local governments, such as New York City, in the United States were early adopters of the approach, providing a sense of the likely effectiveness of calorie labeling in restaurants and other retailers of prepared foods. Research that examines evidence from multiple locations and individual studies, referred to as meta-analysis, does not find much evidence that calorie labeling changes consumers’ food purchasing behavior (see, for instance, VanEpps et al., 2016 or Bleich et al., 2017)