Intervention strategies to promote healthy and sustainable food choices among parents with lower and higher socioeconomic status

BACKGROUND

A global shift towards more healthy and sustainable diets is necessary for the prevention of obesity and chronic diseases, as well as for the growing pressure on our ecosystems. Given that parents are important actors in affecting dietary behaviors of their children, developing intervention strategies targeting families and their practices is promising to reach positive behavior change among children. Also, it is important to tailor these interventions to the needs of parents with different socioeconomic statuses (SES), given that health inequalities continue to grow. This study aims to investigate perspectives of lower and higher SES parents on the usability and acceptability of various innovative intervention strategies.

METHODS

Fourteen focus groups and four individual interviews (n = 78, n_lowerSES = 17; n_higherSES = 61) were conducted in Belgium. A semi-structured interview guide was used to facilitate the discussions. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed via thematic content analysis using NVivo.

RESULTS

To encourage healthy and sustainable food choices, interventions via online food shopping platforms and nudging strategies in grocery stores were mostly cited by higher SES parents, but these were less applicable for lower SES parents as they buy less online and mainly consider the price of products. Mobile applications that provide inspiration for healthy and sustainable recipes and easily accessible shopping lists received moderate support among lower and higher SES parents. Furthermore, both lower and higher SES parents showed interest in meal boxes delivered at home, but lower SES parents have not yet tried such meal boxes because of their higher prices. Still, both groups of SES parents mentioned many advantages of these meal boxes, such as the convenience and time-saving component, as well as the cooking inspiration aspect.

CONCLUSION

Our study reveals the preferences of lower and higher SES parents for practical intervention strategies, providing insight in what features these strategies should have to be acceptable and useful. Hence, the findings can inform the development of a tailored family-based intervention strategy to improve parental food choices in favor of increased health and sustainability.

Determinants of healthy and sustainable food choices in parents with a higher and lower socioeconomic status: A qualitative study

Establishing healthy and sustainable dietary habits in childhood is necessary for the prevention of obesity and chronic diseases, as well as for the growing pressure on our ecosystems. Considering that parents are the most important actors in affecting dietary behaviors of their children, and that there is a social gradient for obesity, this study aims to investigate differences in determinants of both healthy and sustainable food choices among parents with a higher and lower socioeconomic status (SES). Fifteen focus groups and four individual interviews (n = 78) with parents of children aged 6 to 12 were conducted in Belgium. A semi-structured interview guide based on a socioecological model was used. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and thematic content analysis was performed using NVivo 1.0. Findings indicate some differences in determinants of healthy and sustainable food choices among higher and lower SES parents. Generally, higher SES parents reported more barriers for sustainable than for healthy food choices. They showed more positive attitudes towards healthy than sustainable food choices, and reported low knowledge and self-efficacy to make sustainable food choices, while a lack of time was a barrier to cook both healthy and sustainable meals. Lower SES parents, like higher SES parents, showed more positive attitudes towards healthy food choices. They reported high prices and a lack of inspiration and skills as barriers for both food choices, while also being influenced by their cultural backgrounds. For both SES types of parents, children had a strong influence on their healthy and sustainable food choices. The findings suggest socioeconomic differences in determinants of healthy and sustainable food choices. Hence, these differences should be taken into account when developing intervention strategies to improve food choices in parents.

Does a single consumption imagery event increase food desire?

Food desire is an intense motivational state a consumer experiences toward food that accounts for much of consumption. While extant research has shown that experiencing desire elicits consumption imagery, it remains unclear whether consumption imagery alone instigates desire. Even though this directional relationship has been often speculated upon, little empirical study has considered it. This paper empirically identifies imagined consumption as an antecedent of food desire. Six studies show that consumption imagery increases food desire and suggest that this impact is due to induced feelings of deprivation. Our findings also show that increased desire explains previously researched outcomes of imagery, such as a higher willingness to pay for and consumption volumes of the imagined food.

Unpalatable food for thought: Let marketing research guide effective public obesity interventions

The prevalence of obesity is growing unabatedly despite the considerable efforts directed at the problem. Although abundant research has contributed to our understanding of the multifactorial causes of obesity, there is less attention to research that is relevant for guiding social marketers, public health professionals and policymakers in delivering public health interventions for countering and/or preventing the problem of obesity. This review offers six points for identifying and developing research relevant for guiding community-wide obesity interventions based on the idea that an applied marketing research perspective offers a better model for identifying effective interventions than more theoretical academic research. Specifically, the research guiding public health and social marketing interventions needs to (1) provide information on ultimate outcomes (weight, health and unintended consequences) more than intermediate outcomes (beliefs, attitudes and behaviour), (2) report on observations collected over the longer term, (3) use natural settings (even at a cost of internal validity), (4) endeavour to overcome observer-effects, (5) report effect sizes (rather than statistical significance) and (6) use moderator analyses to capture variation in how a population responds to interventions.

Corrigendum: Environmentally Sustainable Food Consumption: A Review and Research Agenda From a Goal-Directed Perspective

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01603.].

Environmentally Sustainable Food Consumption: A Review and Research Agenda From a Goal-Directed Perspective

The challenge of convincing people to change their eating habits toward more environmentally sustainable food consumption (ESFC) patterns is becoming increasingly pressing. Food preferences, choices and eating habits are notoriously hard to change as they are a central aspect of people's lifestyles and their socio-cultural environment. Many people already hold positive attitudes toward sustainable food, but the notable gap between favorable attitudes and actual purchase and consumption of more sustainable food products remains to be bridged. The current work aims to (1) present a comprehensive theoretical framework for future research on ESFC, and (2) highlight behavioral solutions for environmental challenges in the food domain from an interdisciplinary perspective. First, starting from the premise that food consumption is deliberately or unintentionally directed at attaining goals, a goal-directed framework for understanding and influencing ESFC is built. To engage in goal-directed behavior, people typically go through a series of sequential steps. The proposed theoretical framework makes explicit the sequential steps or hurdles that need to be taken for consumers to engage in ESFC. Consumers need to positively value the environment, discern a discrepancy between the desired versus the actual state of the environment, opt for action to reduce the experienced discrepancy, intend to engage in behavior that is expected to bring them closer to the desired end state, and act in accordance with their intention. Second, a critical review of the literature on mechanisms that underlie and explain ESFC (or the lack thereof) in high-income countries is presented and integrated into the goal-directed framework. This contribution thus combines a top-down conceptualization with a bottom-up literature review; it identifies and discusses factors that might hold people back from ESFC and interventions that might promote ESFC; and it reveals knowledge gaps as well as insights on how to encourage both short- and long-term ESFC by confronting extant literature with the theoretical framework. Altogether, the analysis yields a set of 33 future research questions in the interdisciplinary food domain that deserve to be addressed with the aim of fostering ESFC in the short and long term.

Show Me More! The Influence of Visibility on Sustainable Food Choices

Visual cues are omnipresent in an in-store environment and can enhance the visibility of a product. By using these visual cues, policy makers can design a choice environment to nudge consumers towards more sustainable consumer behavior. In this study, we use a combined nudge of display area size and quantity of displayed products to nudge consumers towards more sustainable meat choices. We performed a field experiment of four weeks in a butchery, located in a supermarket. The size of the display area and quantity of displayed poultry products, serving as the nudging intervention, were increased, whereas these were decreased for less sustainable meat products. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our nudging intervention, we also collected data from a control store and performed a pre-and post-intervention measurement. We kept records of the sales data of the sold meat (amount of weight & revenue). When conducting a three-way ANOVA and post hoc contrast tests, we found that the sales of poultry increased during the nudging intervention, but did not decrease for less sustainable meat products. When removing the nudge again, the sales of poultry decreased again significantly in the experimental store. Changing the size of display area and the amount of products displayed in this display area created a shift in the consumers' purchase behavior of meat.

Portion size effects vary: The size of food units is a bigger problem than the number

While it is well-known that larger food portions lead to increased consumption (i.e., the portion size effect), previous studies confound the effect of the size and the number of food units making up the larger portion. Moreover, empirical tests of the mechanism underlying the portions size effect are scarce. In response to these shortcomings, we present three experiments that test the impact of food unit-size and unit-number on consumption of increasingly large portion sizes, and assess whether perceptions of quantity (driven by unit size or number) mediate the portion size effect. Study 1 (n = 185), tracking actual consumption, shows that the portion size effect is determined more by unit-size than unit-number. Relative consumption ratios are higher when participants were served portions made up of enlarged food units compared to more food units. Since perceived quantity and consumption are thought to be negatively related, Study 2 (n = 193) reveals that consumers' quantity perceptions of portions are lower for unit-size (vs. unit-number) increases. Study 3 (n = 189) considers both perceived quantity and consumption and demonstrates that perceived quantity indeed mediates the effect of food portion size on consumption. Finally, this study also shows that encouraging consumers to focus perceptually on size when portion size increases are in terms of unit-size, or focus on number when portion size increases are in terms of unit-number, supports them in increasing quantity perceptions and decreasing actual consumption. Hence, manipulating the perceptual focus of consumers helps to mitigate the portion size effect. The findings contribute to literature on the portion size effect and numerosity heuristic, and provide practical insights on food packaging so to tackle the obesity crisis.