Abstract
Background
The formation of healthy eating habits is supported by repeatedly eating specific foods, but repetition can also reduce enjoyment of those foods. Making the variety in one’s diet salient increases enjoyment of repetitiously consumed foods in a lab setting. Therefore, in a longitudinal field experiment, we tested a brief intervention to remind participants of the variety in their diet. We hypothesized that increasing salience of dietary variety would prevent declines in enjoyment of the food and increase the likelihood that participants would be willing to eat the food again later.
Method
Participants (n = 139) ate a granola bar each day for 2 weeks. Before eating it, participants randomly assigned to the treatment condition recalled other recently consumed foods (to increase salience of dietary variety). Control subjects recalled variety in an unrelated domain (music). Participants reported their enjoyment of the granola bar after they ate it each day, and in a lab session after the study ended, the number of granola bars they took from a selection of snacks was counted.
Results
Self-reported feelings of enjoyment declined steadily, and contrary to our first hypothesis, increasing salience of dietary variety did not prevent this decline. Increasing salience of dietary variety did increase the likelihood that participants would choose to take the same kind of granola bar 2 weeks later.
Conclusion
Brief exercises that make variety in one’s diet more salient may not prevent reductions in enjoyment of a repetitiously consumed food, but may still support continued consumption of the food.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Wood W, Rünger D. Psychology of habit. Annu Rev Psychol. 2016;67:289–314.
Redden JP. Desire over time: the multi-faceted nature of satiation. In: Hofmann W, Nordgre LF, editors. Psychol. Desire. New York: Guilford Press; 2015. p. 82–103.
Rolls BJ. Sensory-specific satiety. Nutr Rev. 1986;44:93–101.
Rothman AJ. Toward a theory-based analysis of behavioral maintenance. Health Psychol. 2000;19:64–9.
Zandstra EH, De Graaf C, Van Trijp HCM. Effects of variety and repeated in-home consumption on product acceptance. Appetite. 2000;35:113–9.
Burns RJ, Rothman AJ. Offering variety: a subtle manipulation to promote healthy food choice throughout the day. Health Psychol. 2014;34:566–70.
Wood W, Tam L, Witt MG. Changing circumstances, disrupting habits. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2005;88:918–33.
Inman JJ. The role of sensory-specific satiety in attribute-level variety seeking. J Consum Res. 2001;28:105–20.
Higgs S, Woodward M. Television watching during lunch increases afternoon snack intake of young women. Appetite. 2009;52:39–43.
Higgs S, Donohoe JE. Focusing on food during lunch enhances lunch memory and decreases later snack intake. Appetite. 2011;57:202–6.
Galak J, Redden JP, Kruger J. Variety amnesia: recalling past variety can accelerate recovery from satiation. J Consum Res. 2009;36:575–84.
Rozin P, Dow S, Moscovitch M, Rajaram S. What causes humans to begin and end a meal? A role for memory for what has been eaten, as evidenced by a study of multiple meal eating in amnesic patients. Psychol Sci. 1998;9:392–6.
Redden JP. Reducing satiation: the role of categorization level. J Consum Res. 2008;34:624–34.
Köster EP, Couronne T, Léon F, Lévy C, Marcelino AS. Repeatability in hedonic sensory measurement: a conceptual exploration. Food Qual Prefer. 2003;14:165–76.
Zandstra EH, Weegels MF, Van Spronsen AA, Klerk M. Scoring or boring? Predicting boredom through repeated in-home consumption. Food Qual Prefer. 2004;15:549–57.
Meiselman HL, Degraaf C, Lesher LL. The effects of variety and monotony on food acceptance and intake at a midday meal. Physiol Behav. 2000;70:119–25.
Wallis DJ, Hetherington MM. Emotions and eating. Self-reported and experimentally induced changes in food intake under stress. Appetite. 2009;52:355–62.
Hetherington MM, Pirie LM, Nabb S. Stimulus satiation: effects of repeated exposure to foods on pleasantness and intake. Appetite. 2002;38:19–28.
Lévy CM, Köster EP. The relevance of initial hedonic judgements in the prediction of subtle food choices. Food Qual Prefer. 1999;10:185–200.
Judd CM, Westfall J, Kenny DA. Experiments with more than one random factor: designs, analytic models, and statistical power. Annu Rev Psychol. 2017;68:601–25.
Redden JP, Haws K. Healthy satiation: the role of decreasing desire in effective self-control. J Consum Res. 2012;39:1100–14.
King NA, Horner K, Hills AP, Byrne NM, Wood RE, Bryant E, et al. Exercise, appetite and weight management: understanding the compensatory responses in eating behaviour and how they contribute to variability in exercise-induced weight loss. Br J Sports Med. 2012;46:315–22.
Desmet PMA, Schifferstein HNJ. Sources of positive and negative emotions in food experience. Appetite. 2008;50:290–301.
RStudio | Open source & professional software for data science teams – RStudio. n.d. https://rstudio.com/. Accessed 10 Jan 2020.
Kuznetsova A, Brockhoff PB, Christensen RHB. lmerTest: tests for random and fixed effects for linear mixed effect models. R package version 2.0-11. 2014. URL https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lmerTest.
Linear and nonlinear mixed effects models [R package nlme version 3.1-143] n.d.
Acknowledgments
We thank Samantha Cinnick and Lucy Zhou for managing the study.
Open Science
All materials and data are available anonymized at: https://osf.io/vh6ub/?view_only=7d3f6b914fa0486cbbaa12ae05626be1
Funding
This research was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Award #NNX12AE56G to ZV, JPR, and TM.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Informed Consent
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Ethical Approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lenne, R.L., Mann, T., Burns, R.J. et al. Variety Salience and Enjoyment of Repetitiously Consumed Foods: a Field Experiment. Int.J. Behav. Med. 28, 286–291 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-020-09916-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-020-09916-2