What solutions do experts and students think of to get people to eat healthier? A summary of the Oslo workshop

This week I attended a workshop in Oslo in the beautiful building of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The aim of the workshop organized by our Food Ecology group of the Center of Advanced Studies was to come up with novel communication solutions to combat unhealthy eating habits. Guess what the typical ideas are that groups of participants came up with? First of all, apps and blogs are seen as a key solution to inspire consumers to change their behavior. The winning group came with an app for children that reward them for tasting new healthy foods. Other ideas were Facebook cooking pages and nutrition education campaigns targeting hard to reach consumers.

I admit that I am not objective, but I believe that our group came up with a very innovative nudge; a smart cap for sugary soft drink bottles that reduces the sip size. A study of Pascalle Weijzen and colleagues showed that smaller sip sizes lead to less consumption and quicker satisfaction. Our soft drink bottle concept also includes portion size indicators using clever sound and color sensors that indicate a suitable portion size. Enjoy more and drink less! However, one jury member called that 'a fantasy' and another jury member worried about Norwegian consumers traveling to Sweden to purchase cheaper soft drinks. Too bad...

Interestingly, when people are asked to come up with solutions, they first of all seem to think of the educational route to persuasion. This may be obvious, but Walls and colleagues wrote in their paper called 'Why education and choice won't solve the obesity problem' in the American Journal of Public Health: 'Although education and access to information are fundamental rights and are important in a democracy, they have a negligible impact on obesity'.

Anyway, it was fun to see how education is like the first intuitive way to go, even though it is getting more and more clear that focusing solely on increasing people's knowledge will not be sufficient in changing eating habits.

Interview Professor Paul Rozin: Why we have to change people's world if we want them to eat better

Retiring this year, but still busy doing research. Inspired by the way musical pieces often start out slow, build up and then climax, he enthusiastically talks about a new project. 'People come up with a summary judgement of how good a meal is. We are looking at the degree to which an ending is important. You put the best things at the end. People like things that rise', he explains a new study.

In December, I am invited to stay at the Centre For Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Every year, this centre hosts three parallel research groups organized around a central theme. One theme of this year is 'The ecology of food perception'.  Researchers from Norway and abroad are invited to work together for several months. Paul Rozin is also invited and I visited him during his stay. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Paul Rozin is considered to be one of the most influential researchers on human food choice and particularly known for his work on the meaning of disgust.

We talked about working with Brian Wansink ('We have similar attitudes towards things and we are both outliers'), journals' bias to only publish positive results ('That is ridiculous') and pressure to publish or follow a particular model of how to do research. 'The basis question one should ask is how much the contribution adds to understanding', he writes in his 2009 paper in Perspectives on Psychological Sciences. In this paper, Paul Rozin talks about the value of moving from top-down hypothesis testing as dominant research model in many top psychological journals to research approaches that lead to broader generalizations of interesting phenomena. ''What they do is that they find something with a set of experimental parameters and then instead of saying 'Is this real?', 'Can I change the parameters a bit and is it still there?', they go ahead, they analyse it and they go down. That is what a journal wants', he said. Exploring the large picture of a phenomenon is key according to him; 'Even in the lab, you can vary your parameters. A parameter that you think is not critical, often is in real life'.

We went on to talk about obesity ('We plateaued, I think it is because we now drink more bottled water') and interventions that could help people to eat better. When I asked his opinion on Herman and Polivy's argument that not much progress has been made so far in combatting the obesity problem and that it is probably easier to make the case that things are getting worse, he strongly agrees. 'I think they are right. They are very smart people, they worked on this for decades. I have said that but I do not know whether I said it in print. Nothing has been shown to work except maybe bariatric surgery', he said.

This may seem a pessimistic view, but Paul Rozin has clear ideas about possible solutions. He is a believer of the nudge approach: 'I do not think that we can change people. I think we have to change their world. That is what I think has happened in France. Their world is different, the way their food is presented is different. That is why they have half our obesity rates. I cannot proof that, there are too many variables. That is encouraging, that their environment is so different and they are much thinner.'

Paul Rozin, however, is not yet convinced about the long-term potential of nudging: 'There is no question that it works in the short run. What we do not know is whether nudging will work in the long run. We know that it works over a week, but we don't know whether it works over a year, because there may be compensation in various ways. Doing a year's study will involve a lot of investment. You have to get too many people to support you', he said. An interesting perspective of Professor Paul Rozin; a leading expert you should definitely continue to follow.