(PO13-23-22) The Impact of Active Consideration of Health Outcomes on the Nutritional Quality of Food Choices

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Presenting Author(s)

OT

Olivier Tuyizere, Master's Student
– Graduate Research Assistant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States

Co-Author(s)

CG

Christopher Gustafson, PhD
– Associate Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States

Disclosure(s):

Olivier Tuyizere, Master's Student: No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.

Objectives: Beliefs about the future implications of behaviors affect people’s health decisions (Joireman et al., 2012). The objective of this study is to examine the proportion of individuals who consider current and/or future implications of food choices and to evaluate the impact of considering current and future health outcomes when making food choices on the nutritional quality of products selected. We hypothesize that participants who actively consider health outcomes will order more nutritional foods than those who do not.

Methods: We conducted an online food choice experiment in August 2021 with 502 adult (≥19 years old) residents of the US recruited from Prolific, an online survey recruitment platform. The survey consisted of a hypothetical shopping task in three product categories: cereals, bread, and crackers. Each product category featured dozens of distinct options and participants could also decline to select items from any category. Participants answered questions about the choices they made and completed demographic questions.

Participants indicated whether they had considered the impact of the foods on current and future health. To measure overall nutritional quality, we use the Guiding Stars (GS) rating system (https://guidingstars.com/), which rates products based on nutrient content from 0 (low nutritional quality) to 3 (high nutritional quality) stars as the variable of interest in our analysis. We conducted a linear regression of GS on consideration of current and/or future health benefits and demographic characteristics.

Results: Those who considered current health outcomes, future health outcomes, and both current and future health outcomes selected products with 0.422, 0.585, and 0.591 more GS per product, respectively, than those who did not consider health outcomes.

Conclusions: The result of this study confirms that people who actively consider long-term implications of their daily eating choices eat more nutritional foods compared to those who don’t. Policies and health prompts oriented towards the future could improve healthy eating.

Funding Sources: This study was funded by the ARD Wheat Innovation Fund at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.