Food labeling & peer influence improves shopping/ diet quality:
Adding behavioural nudges and financial incentives improves diet quality by a significant amount. This backs up what coaches have been saying forever, that you need clarity about what to do or you just won't do anything. You need to know why it is important and the benefits so you can judge the effort vs reward and make a smart choice. It turns out that adding a little competition, a small financial reward and maybe a fear of being judged about your shopping choices also drives healthy behaviour.
Supermarkets could and should build into their online shopping systems peer comparison and health scores without much difficulty given all the nutritional information must be available. If they were smart, they could also incentivise healthy choices by providing a low cost reward (coupons maybe) that you would lose if your basket was above a threshold for 'unhealthy'.
Researchers from Duke-NUS' Health Services and Systems Research Programme conducted a randomised trial. There were three groups, no front of packaging food labels, front of package food labels and food labels + peer influence and a chance not to lose a $5 healthy shopping bonus.
"shoppers were exposed to the front-of-pack labels and peer influence, there was a large improvement in the healthiness of the shopping basket. There was an additional improvement in the "yours-to-lose" cash reward arm, but the biggest bang came from the peer influence."
" When the researchers allowed participants to see the front-of-pack labels and how their shopping basket compared to that of their peers, there was a 14 per cent improvement in the diet quality of the shopping basket" – Science Daily
Professor Eric Finkelstein, from Duke-NUS Health Services and Systems Research Programme, said: "We've seen peer influence be effective at reducing energy consumption. With this study, we've demonstrated that it can also motivate consumers to select more nutritional items. This is a simple and costless way to fight chronic diseases. I hope our findings encourage supermarkets to introduce these interventions into their online shopping environment."
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