Food Acceptability in Field Studies with US Army Men and Women: Relationship with Food Intake and Food Choice After Repeated Exposures

Laboratory data with single exposures showed that palatability has a positive relationship with food intake. The question addressed in this study is whether this relationship also holds over repeated exposures in non-laboratory contexts in more natural environments. The data were collected in four field studies, lasting 4–11 days with 307 US Army men and 119 Army women, and comprised 5791 main meals and 8831 snacks in total. Acceptability was rated on the nine point hedonic scale, and intake was registered in units of 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, or 1 or more times of the provided portion size. Correlation coefficients between individual acceptability ratings and intakes varied from 0.22 to 0.62 for the main meals (n=193–2267), and between 0.13 and 0.56 for the snacks (n=304–2967). The likelihood of choosing a meal for the second time was positively related to the acceptability rating of the meal when it was consumed for the first time. The results reinforce the importance of liking in food choice and food intake/choice behavior. However, the magnitude of the correlation coefficients between acceptability ratings and food intake suggest that environmental factors also have an important role in determining intake and choice

Food Acceptability in Field Studies with US Army Men and Women: Relationship with Food Intake and Food Choice After Repeated Exposures

Laboratory data with single exposures showed that palatability has a positive relationship with food intake. The question addressed in this study is whether this relationship also holds over repeated exposures in non-laboratory contexts in more natural environments. The data were collected in four field studies, lasting 4–11 days with 307 US Army men and 119 Army women, and comprised 5791 main meals and 8831 snacks in total. Acceptability was rated on the nine point hedonic scale, and intake was registered in units of 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, or 1 or more times of the provided portion size. Correlation coefficients between individual acceptability ratings and intakes varied from 0.22 to 0.62 for the main meals (n=193–2267), and between 0.13 and 0.56 for the snacks (n=304–2967). The likelihood of choosing a meal for the second time was positively related to the acceptability rating of the meal when it was consumed for the first time. The results reinforce the importance of liking in food choice and food intake/choice behavior. However, the magnitude of the correlation coefficients between acceptability ratings and food intake suggest that environmental factors also have an important role in determining intake and choice

Food Acceptability in Field Studies with US Army Men and Women: Relationship with Food Intake and Food Choice After Repeated Exposures

Laboratory data with single exposures showed that palatability has a positive relationship with food intake. The question addressed in this study is whether this relationship also holds over repeated exposures in non-laboratory contexts in more natural environments. The data were collected in four field studies, lasting 4–11 days with 307 US Army men and 119 Army women, and comprised 5791 main meals and 8831 snacks in total. Acceptability was rated on the nine point hedonic scale, and intake was registered in units of 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, or 1 or more times of the provided portion size. Correlation coefficients between individual acceptability ratings and intakes varied from 0.22 to 0.62 for the main meals (n=193–2267), and between 0.13 and 0.56 for the snacks (n=304–2967). The likelihood of choosing a meal for the second time was positively related to the acceptability rating of the meal when it was consumed for the first time. The results reinforce the importance of liking in food choice and food intake/choice behavior. However, the magnitude of the correlation coefficients between acceptability ratings and food intake suggest that environmental factors also have an important role in determining intake and choice

The potential of using emoji instead of words when measuring emotions associated with food

Research shows that both emoji and word based questionnaires show information beyond liking measures alone. Prior research found that word based questionnaires were more discriminating than emoji when studying well liked products, suggesting their potential use with popular commercial products and for food product development. Based on limited evidence to date it is unclear if the emoji and word based questionnaires have a similar discriminative ability, although response format might have an impact. Another question is whether words or emoji show greater potential for more detailed evaluations with multiple related words. Emoji might have an advantage in cross cultural research where word translation is challenging. There are still relatively few studies that directly compare the two methods. Overall, we see the potential of using emoji in food-related emotion research and support the call of Jaeger, Vidal and Ares (2020) for more research on both word and emoji questionnaires

Daily happiness: How well we feel most of the time

The word ‘happiness’ is commonly used in literature on emotions, but not always with the same meaning. In this chapter I first delineate the many meanings of the term happiness as used by researchers, and then I focus on happiness defined in the sense of ‘feeling well most of the time’. I then review the available scientific literature on this kind of happiness and consider 1) how it is measured, 2) how well people typically feel, 3) why some people feel mostly better than other people do and 4) on the consequences of feeling good or bad most of the time. To do this I draw on the growing body of empirical research on daily mood, the results of which are gathered in the World Database of Happiness, which serves as an online appendix to this chapte

Effects of Food Attributes and Feeding Environment on Acceptance, Consumption and Body Weight: Lessons Learned in a Twenty-Year Program of Military Ration Research

Twenty years of testing in the field has consistently revealed that food intake is inadequate when packaged military rations are fed as the sole source of food. Food intake is much lower and there is a loss of body weight. Conversely when these rations are fed to students or military personnel for periods ranging from 3 to 42 days in a cafeteria-like setting, food intake is comparable to levels of a control group provided with freshly prepared food. Under these conditions, body weight is maintained. In this review, the consumption pattern is considered in terms of characteristics of the food (acceptability, variety, portion size, beverages, serving temperature, appropriateness for time of day, monotony, and novelty) and the eating milieu (social interactions, time, ease of preparing and consuming a meal). The twenty-year program of military ration research has led us to conclude that both the food and the context must be considered in understanding and controlling food intake

Emotions before and after a meal in a natural eating situation

International audienc

The Use of Demographics and Psychographics to Study Product Effects with Nutrient Supplements: Exploratory Multi-Country Data

Demographics and psychographics are used to study the influence of different consumers on product effects in food development and testing. Demographics have a longer history and are routinely used in most research; psychographics are more recent, raising the question of whether they add to research on food products. The research presented here represents extensive exploratory data that demonstrate that both demographic measures and psychographic measures add to our understanding of consumer’s liking ratings for nutrient supplements. The results are discussed in the context of broader research on a range of food products. In addition, the research reported here was conducted in four different countries, demonstrating many country effects. Finally, tests were conducted with users of the products, lapsed users of the product, and users of other nutrient supplements (non-users), and this led to many differences in product testing. These results further suggest that age and gender are not the only demographic variables to be studied, along with psychographic variables. The psychographic variables should be selected for a particular product category under investigation, as effects of specific psychographic measures vary for product categories. Specific variables do not fit all products for both demographics and psychographics