Harnessing adolescent values to motivate healthier eating

Abstract

What can be done to reduce unhealthy eating among adolescents? It was hypothesized that aligning healthy eating with important and widely shared adolescent values would produce the needed motivation. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled experiment with eighth graders (total n = 536) evaluated the impact of a treatment that framed healthy eating as consistent with the adolescent values of autonomy from adult control and the pursuit of social justice. Healthy eating was suggested as a way to take a stand against manipulative and unfair practices of the food industry, such as engineering junk food to make it addictive and marketing it to young children. Compared with traditional health education materials or to a non-food-related control, this treatment led eighth graders to see healthy eating as more autonomy-assertive and social justice-oriented behavior and to forgo sugary snacks and drinks in favor of healthier options a day later in an unrelated context. Public health interventions for adolescents may be more effective when they harness the motivational power of that group's existing strongly held values.

Keywords: adolescent health behavior; construal; field experiment; intertemporal choice; temporal discounting.

Fig. 1.

Effect of exposé treatment on free-choice unhealthy food and drink choices, 1 d postintervention. n = 469. Bars represent SEM.

Fig. 2.

Path model for effect of exposé treatment on unhealthy snack choices (range, 0–3) through psychological measures. Numbers above lines correspond to direct effects (c paths); numbers below lines correspond to direct paths controlling for mediators (c’ paths). b, unstandardized OLS regression coefficient. *P < 0.05; ***P < 0.001; n.s., nonsignificant.