Food and Health: Behavioral Economics and Response to Intervention

Food consumption meets each person’s immediate need for dietary energy each day, with foods selected in pursuit of various goals such as taste and enjoyment, convenience and social aspirations. Food consumption also has long-term impacts on a person’s future health, but a food’s appearance and its taste or smell convey little information and might even be misleading about those future impacts. The link between food and future health is particularly unclear for recently introduced packaged and processed foods or meals away from home that have new ingredients in unfamiliar combinations. Centuries of trial and error give people a variety of food traditions, while market forces create rapidly changing and diverse food environments influenced by a variety of policies and programs, some of which are influenced by recent scientific evidence. This chapter introduces the tools of behavioral economics used to understand preferences and guide intervention. Behavioral economics in general addresses psychological causes of preference reversals, whereby people contradict themselves with inconsistent choices due to systematic patterns such as loss aversion and present bias, and thereby do not reach the highest levels of wellbeing for their future selves. Food choice is a kind of health behavior for which both psychology and underlying biology play a central role, creating the need and opportunity for well-designed interventions to improve future wellbeing.