You can use subtle tricks to keep you on a healthy track
As worldwide obesity climbs, the search for cost-effective strategies to facilitate healthy eating among weight-conscious consumers is critical. New research shows that subtle goal reminders, called primes, can facilitate health behavior. This technique has great potential as it is unobtrusive, easy to implement, and low in cost. Until it becomes public policy, you can use priming to achieve your health goals by adding subtle reminders to your kitchen and recipes—read on for how to do it.
Goal Priming for Health
A number of experiments by Esther Papies and colleagues of Utrecht University, The Netherlands, suggest that simply adding words related to health and weight on posters, restaurant menus, and recipe cards can stimulate healthy food choices among dieters and overweight individuals.
Numerous studies have shown that conscious intentions for healthy eating and dieting are not sufficient to create healthy eating patterns; instead, consumers are heavily influenced by their eating habits and by food temptations in their environment. People struggling with their weight are especially susceptible to the effects of easily-available food temptations—showing strong hedonic responses to tasty, high-calorie food.
To bolster these individuals against these detrimental effects of an obesity-promoting environment, priming methods can help dieters eat fewer high-calorie tasty snacks. In a field experiment, customers of a local butcher store were observed on days when a poster announcing a dieting recipe had been mounted on the door, and on other days when the poster was not present. When the diet recipe reminded dieters of their health goal, they ate less of the bite-size meat snacks the store offered than on other days. Customers who were not concerned with controlling their weight were not affected. Thus, goal priming is an effective strategy to help weight-concerned individuals translate their intentions into behavior, especially when faced with temptation.
Applying Priming
Most recently, this priming method was applied in a field experiment in a grocery store. Here, overweight and diet-concerned individuals who were handed a recipe flyer with health-related words before shopping bought less unhealthy snacks, such as chips, cookies, and cake. Interestingly, this was hardly affected by how much attention participants said they had paid to the recipes. It seems very little conscious awareness is needed for such primes to affect health behavior.
And that’s where the opportunity to apply these principles yourself comes in. Can you make posters or post notes on your refrigerator, pantry, cabinets, and other food-traffic areas reminding yourself of healthy eating principles? Can you add notes to your printed-out recipes or in cookbooks that remind you of your health goals? Even if your health goals are not related to weight—drinking more water, consuming more veggies, or cutting out sugar—these subtle goal primes can greatly impact your health.
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