5. Understanding why healthy eating is so difficult.

Human appetite and scarcity

• Human appetite is shaped under scarcity

• Food access was unpredictable

• Energy storage increased survival

• Overeating was adaptive

• Our appetite system prioritizes intake, not precision.

Sensory specific satiety

• Eating reduces the appeal of the food we are eating

• To ensure variety intake, from a evolutionary perspective also valuable

• Children were more likely to eat a second snack if it was a different second snack.

Boundary model

The idea that you have two extremes, extremely full or extremely hungry.

• In between is the mindless eating zone

Conditioned satiety

• Through previous experience, we learn what to expect from a food

• This influences how much we at, but does not prevent overeating

Children vs. adults: who compensates based on calories?

Children compensated perfectly, if they had a high-energy preload than they ate less lunch.

Adults did not do this: ate just as much lunch as they normally would

This is because maybe:

• Satiety develops relatively slow - not much precise information about how much we had

• Eating more is not compensated typically

• Clean plate: parents may teach children to finish everything on plate → children learn to ignore fullness?

How do we often decide quantity? How does this differ with age?

• Adults rely on external cues (portion size, packaging, norms)

• Children rely more on internal cues, but with age, external cues dominate.

Three cues in our food environment

1. Food is everywhere - there are too many calories available.

   • Also on our phones through marketing and ads.

   • Cheap, tasty long-lasting products are more profitable

   • Fresh, healthy products: higher costs

2. Portion and package size

   • More served = more consumed

   • When there are bigger portions in packages you are likely to consume more (e.g. big mars vs small mars)

3. Marketing and advertising

   • Digital marketing more powerful through repeated exposure and personalization

   • You get exposed to things you like.

   • Certain unhealthy things are not allowed on packaging anymore like k3

   • Guilt is lower when packages say “fitness” or “light”

The unqeal food environment

• Some people are surrounded by more unhealthy food cues than others

• More unhealthy exposure in disadvantaged neighborhoods → linked to less healthy diets and higher risks

• Algorithmic reinforcement online may create unhealthy filter bubbles

Two ways in which we respond to food cues

• Thinking fast = system 1

• Thinking slow = system 2

What does our long-term memory look like?

• Is an associative network

• Seeing or being asked about one node → activates another one in memory

• Activation spreads to connected concepts

• Modern food environment = constant activation

Why it feels normal to eat more

• Repeated activations makes certain ideas feel normal and expected

• ‘I deserve a treat’, ‘All students eat this’ are automatically activated norms

• Eating becomes habitual

How can a single cue shape our whole perception of a product

• Protein hype is good example

• Just because it has more protein does not mean its healthy

Heuristics

Heuristics in marketing are fast, subconscious mental shortcuts that consumers and marketers use to simplify complex, time-sensitive decisions and reduce cognitive load under uncertainty

• direct responses to cues in environment

• strong influence on what, when and how much we eat

Examples of heuristics

• Large = better value

• Scarcity = popular and good

• Vegetables in meal = less calories

• Healthy = expensive

Dose insensitivity

• Example of heuristic

• If something is harmful in large quantities, then it is also harmful in small quantities

• Fat is often seen as unhealthy, even in small amounts

• The presence of chemicals may be interpreted as proof of danger regardless of the amount.

Negative calorie illusion

• The idea that if there is a salad next to a burger that the burger becomes healthier

• But of course the burger remains the same calories

Can we regulate our responses?

• Yes we can plan ahead and think about consequences with pre-frontal cortex

• To self regulate we need to recognize a conflict and choose a strategy to change our food choice.

• This thinking is also in the form of system one and two:

  • System 1: fast, automatic responses

  • system 2: slower, reflective thinking → self-regulation helps us manage automatic responses, but requires attention and effort

• Capacity depends on our state (not tired, overwhelmed, emotional) → otherwise ‘automatic’ system 1)

Four strategy families in eating decisions

• Cognitive change: changing the way you think about the food (e.g. train your mindset to like the idea of eating healthy)

• Response modulation: changing how you react or respond to the craving (e.g. first drink a glass of water)

• Situational strategies: changing your environment to avoid the temptation (e.g. putting unhealthy foods in a different location)

• Additional deployment: changing where you focus your attention (e.g. at a party don’t stand near buffet but focus attention on people present)

Why do people still fail when using the four strategies?

• They pick the weakest strategy (cognitive change)

• They have no back-up plan: they use only one strategy

• they run out of energy: fighting temptation costs a lot of brain energy

• They think in “black & white”: one small mistake feels like total failure, which leads to overeating

• They use them as an excuse (self-licensing) (“now i deserve a treat”)

Study: self-licensing

• 95 female students did writing taks of 15 minutes

• They were told the task was high-effort, low effort or received no info

• After task; high caloric snacks to enjoy

• Self-licensing = using justifications to give yourself permission to give into temptation

When does self-regulation become too rigid?

• ‘All or nothing’ mentality: one deviation = failure

• Little flexibility to adjust strategies

• Can produce disinhibition: “I have failed, so it no longer matters”

• Most important predictor of gaining weight after losing weight

• Accepting imperfection might prevent this cycle

Scarcity mindset and self-regulation

Some groups have more financial stress leading to tunneling (e.g. only foucs on price), high congnitive load (brain energy gone) and present focus