Perceiving food as tasty is important. It’s not good enough simply to tell people what is healthy if they don’t think those foods are also tasty.
- Suzanna Forwood
The solution to the obesity epidemic is simple: eat less, move more. But take a deep breath before you type these four words into a search engine. The results exceed 9 million. Of the top four results, two websites argue against the statement and two for it. Below, arguments about eating and exercise rage fast and furious with dozens of assertions backed by equations, flowcharts, promises of slimming success, and lists of the latest superfoods.
“Despite all we know about food, we know remarkably little about the process of food choice,” says Dr Suzanna Forwood, until recently Research Associate at the Behaviour and Health Research Unit (Cambridge University) and now Lecturer in Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University. “In a supermarket we’re bombarded with the thousands of products on the shelves and but most of the time we happily make relatively quick decisions about what to buy. So what’s going on in our minds when we reach out for our favourite breakfast cereal?”
When it comes to eating, we’re all experts. We’re secure in our own opinions (and prejudices) and have no shortage of advice for everyone else. The truth is that, in common with many human activities, our relationship with food is complex and deeply embedded in culture. Forwood says: “Whenever I give a talk, even to an academic audience, people will listen to me talk about the big picture and then come up to me afterwards to tell me about their personal experiences – typically what they spotted in other people’s trolleys the day before.”
We might broadly agree that eating less (and better) and moving more, a message endorsed by the NHS, makes sense – but do we act accordingly? We don’t.
Read the full story
Image: Nancy's Fruit Salad by John Hritz
Credit: Flickr Creative Commons
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
__________________________________________________