What Shapes Your Food Choices?

Calorie count temptations.

Dr. Marco Palma
Presidential Impact Fellow and Professor, Agricultural Economics

In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration started requiring restaurant chains to list calories on their menus to help people make healthier meal choices. But the results weren’t so straightforward. “Some national studies found that providing calorie information reduces calorie consumption,” said Dr. Marco Palma, director of Texas A&M’s Human Behavior Laboratory. “But others have found no effect, and a few show that it could make people eat more.”

Palma is examining ways other factors combine with calorie count to produce such varying results. In one recent study, his team discovered that if a meal has more calories than someone believes, they’ll likely eat less, but if an item has fewer calories than expected, they might reach for that extra fry or cookie without feeling guilty about the additional calories.

In another study, Palma found that higher-calorie menu items make healthier options less appealing and introduce another layer to your decision: temptation. When you see tasty food, the pleasure region of your brain lights up. But when you see something healthy, a different brain area activates: the self-control center. “It’s almost as if you have two different selves within your brain constantly fighting over what to do,” Palma explained.

But for anyone wanting to cut calories, there’s good news: If you start with small, attainable goals and gradually build up to greater changes, you can strengthen your self-control. “Self-control is like a muscle,” Palma said. “You can enhance your motivation through the taste of small successes along the way.”
 

The way you eat.

Dr. Rhonda Miller
AgriLife Research Faculty Fellow and Professor, Animal Science

Do you prefer soft-serve ice cream, or do you go for options filled with big cookie chunks? Your answer can reveal a lot about your texture preferences and therefore your purchasing decisions, said Dr. Rhonda Miller. The director of Texas A&M’s Sensory Science Evaluation Laboratory, Miller studies the sensory elements of meat and other food to help companies improve their products. But her view of food behavior expanded when one of her former students in the food industry, Jennifer Vahalik ’92 ’95, introduced her to the idea of mouth behavior types.

According to this concept, people fall into one of four groups based on how they eat their food: crunchers, who love hard, crunchy food; chewers, who enjoy food that provides more chew; suckers, who prefer to suck the flavor from their food; and smooshers, who like smooth foods they can move around their mouth. “These behaviors are very important in food selection and food aversion,” Miller explained. “They drive what we purchase.”

Miller applied this concept to meat by studying how mouth type affects people’s concept of the ideal hamburger, steak and pork chop. She discovered that while everyone said they wanted a tender and juicy pork chop, each type defined the terms differently. “That was eye-opening,” she said. “If you tell people something is tender but it’s not tender in the way they define it, they won’t purchase your product again.” By understanding these differences, she hopes to help meat producers improve their products to make consumers happy, no matter their preferences.
 

Who you listen to.

But knowledge and expertise aren’t the only elements that matter. “People make purchasing decisions based on emotion,” Baker explained. Through continued research, he hopes to help developers determine the right messaging balance between knowledge and emotion to tailor their communication for different groups.

“Everyone should do their homework on the nutritional value of what they purchase, but your decision-making will differ based on the aspects of a product you value most,” Baker added. “And if you don’t like your food decisions, every day is a new day to change.”

Tackle today’s biggest food-related questions through a gift supporting outstanding faculty in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. To learn more, contact Jennifer Ann Scasta ’11 below.