Can You Sneak Change Into Your Life?
If Animal House is any indication of the average college undergrad’s diet then there is quite a bit of room for improvement. Granted, the movie is over 30 years old, but I don’t think student nutrition has improved much.
But how could you get these students to eat better? For one thing, what motivates them? And could you trick them into eating healthier?
Motivations: outcome versus process
There are a couple of ways to approach motivation: focusing on the outcome or end result; or focusing on the process.
Outcome-based motivations
Pretty much most of us end up using outcome-based motivations to try to change our behaviours, using some sort of end result as a goal. Outcome motivations tend to be things like:
- Lose 10 lbs
- Get down to single-digit body fat
- Improve blood glucose
- Fit in to skinny jeans
Sounds good, but there are a few problems here.
- There is no reward for behaviour changes — only for reaching the goal (outcome). If you don’t fit into your skinny jeans, then it doesn’t matter that you stopped drinking 2 sodas a day and ate 5 more servings of vegetables (up from 0).
- If you don’t get to your outcome, you figure you’ve failed (so you say to heck with it, fall off the wagon, and revert back to where you started).
- You often can’t control the outcome. You can’t usually force your body to lose a certain amount of fat in a specified time, for example. This adds to the possibility of perceived failure.
- You don’t always focus on how you’re going to get to those skinny jeans. You just know you want to. Many people with outcome goals don’t really have a plan.
So outcome-based goals seem like a good idea on paper, but don’t always give you the results you want — and the risk of “failure” is high.
Process-based motivations
One the other hand, if your main motivation is having a weekly grocery day where you buy, organize, plan and cook your meals for the week then you’re knee-deep into process motivation.
Instead of focusing on what happens eventually if you eat healthy (i.e. lose weight, become healthier, etc) you focus on the process of living a healthful lifestyle (1), and taking the steps you need to take to make the outcome occur. Process goals are things like:
- Get to the gym 4 times a week
- Walk for 20 minutes every day
- Eat 5 servings of vegetables a day
- Drink 1 less cup of coffee a day
Process-based goals are much more satisfying. You can live your little successes every day, and you can control what you do.
Furthermore, process-based motivations are — ironically — much more likely to result in the desired outcome.
Stealth interventions
The other cool thing about process-based goals and motivations is that you can do “stealth interventions”, in which you don’t know about, or you can easily forget about, the outcome.
For example, you can increase adolescent girls’ physical activity by offering dance classes or reducing TV viewing, which leads to more physical activity (2 & 3). Officially, the project is to have fun with dance classes or watch less TV, which keeps the girls from getting too fixated on “getting exercise”.
This week’s review is about using college courses as stealth interventions to improve students’ diet.
Hekler EB, Gardner CD, Robinson TN. Effects of a college course about food and society on students’ eating behaviors. Am J Prev Med. 2010 May;38(5):543-7.
Methods
The researchers wanted to compare eating behaviours of college students from Stanford University in Stanford, California before and after they took different health courses.
They had 100 students fill out a Food Frequency Questionnaire in January 2009 (the beginning of the courses) and the end of March 2009 (the end of the courses).
The courses were all upper level Human Biology. Here are the course overviews.
Food and Society: Exploring Eating Behaviours in a Social, Environmental and Policy Context (HUMBIO166):
This course, taught by the study authors, focuses on how the foods we eat are affected by economics, agriculture and politics as well as other factors. The course focuses on food-related social issues like local versus global food, small farming versus industrial farming for example, rather than health issues related to food choices. Course material included such books and documentaries as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the documentary King Corn (2007). Though Food, Inc. wasn’t included (it hadn’t come out yet), the content would be consistent with the goals of the course.
Community Health Psychology (PSYCH101/HUMBIO 128):
This course focuses on behaviour change to improve health, health promotion in the community, and the psychology of illness and disease management.
Community Health: Assessment and Planning I (HUMBIO 127A):
This course looks at the major determinants of health in a community to identify health issues and plan programs and policies to prevent disease and promote health.
Obesity in America: Clinical and Public Health Implications (HUMBIO 123):
This course looks at the clinical, research, and policy approaches of different disciplines. It covers such topics as biological and physiological mechanisms; clinical treatments including medications and surgery; and the relevance of behavioral, environmental, economic, and policy approaches to obesity prevention and control.
Figure 1 below shows proportionally how many students were in the food and society course and how many were in the other courses.
Food frequency questionnaire
Self-reporting of the food we eat is not necessarily particularly accurate; however that’s what they used for this study. However, we have to accept that self-reporting may show both actual changes in food intake as well as changes in reporting of food intake.
Results
Changes in values
After taking the Food and Society course, students valued environmental sustainability, animal rights and eating healthfully more than before taking the course (Figure 2). Since the course increases awareness of these issues, it’s no surprise that the students valued these things more after becoming more informed about them.
Figure 2: Change in importance of values. Click to enlarge
You may think valuing healthy eating makes no sense if the course wasn’t officially about healthy eating, but if you think about it, eating local food, organic food, less processed food, less meat (or grass fed beef) is all better for you, the environment, and the animals. Interesting how everything is connected.
Meanwhile, the other students showed no real change in how they valued environmental sustainability, animal rights and healthful eating.
Fair enough — I didn’t think that Obesity in America or the other courses were going to change anybody’s feelings on the environment or animal rights, but wow — zero change in healthful eating after taking courses about health promotion. As a sorta health educator myself, that hurts.
Changes in diet
Okay, so the students’ values did or didn’t change. So what? Did change in values relate to any other changes? After all, around January of every year, people value going to the gym… for a couple of months.
Well, as you can see in Figure 3 below, the Food and Society students not only valued eating a healthier diet, they actually reported eating a healthier diet that included more vegetables, less dairy and meat fats, and fewer sweets. Students from the other courses actually reported eating fewer vegetables – these were college students, after all.
Figure 3: Changes in self-reported eating. Click to enlarge.
Conclusion and discussion
Students who took a college course in Food and Society, which focused on social, ethical, cultural and environmental issues, similar in scope to recent books and documentaries like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food, Inc., ended up eating healthier diets even though the course was not officially about eating healthier.
Other students taking traditional health and food courses had no change in diet.
Desensitized to food
It seems that apparently paradoxically, providing health improvement information to people doesn’t actually affect their values or their diet.
Could it be that we’ve been bombarded with so much junk food that we’ve become desensitized to it and information on eating healthy doesn’t sink in? Should we add junk food to sex and violence – one more thing to which we’ve become desensitized in the modern world? Or is it that we’ve become desensitized to the health messages?
Problems
Since students self-reported food intake, we have to be wary, as people are notoriously bad at keeping an accurate record of what they ate. This study looked at changes before and after the course, so the hope is that if they’re inaccurate before they would be after, to the same degree. Still there is a possibility that the Food and Society course lead to the students reporting eating better, but not actually eating better.
The second problem with this study is that the students weren’t randomly assigned to the courses – could you imagine registering for “HUMBIO 1?? Lottery!” where you could be registered into one of four possible classes? It could be that students who picked Food and Society were more likely to change their habits.
Bottom line
Those of you who have taken or are taking the Lean Eating course have probably wondered: Why are they making me read these books, watch these movies, or learn these lessons? Why are they making me go vegetable hunting, try weird one-day projects, or hop on one foot while rubbing my tummy in the grocery store?
The aim is/was for you to inadvertently change your dietary habits through understanding the social, cultural, ethical and environmental issues – rubbing your tummy in the grocery store was just for fun.
Given the results of this study — and the Lean Eating program — maybe this stuff is not so crazy after all.
References
- Robinson TN. Stealth interventions for obesity prevention and control: motivating behaviour change. In: dube L, Bechara A, Dagher A, et al., eds. Obesity prevention: the role of brain and society on individual behaviour. New York: Elsevier, in press.
- Robinson TN, et al. Dance and reducing television viewing to prevent weight gain in African-American girls: the Stanford GEMS pilot study. Ethn Dis. 2003 Winter;13(1 Suppl 1):S65-77.
- Robinson TN.Reducing children’s television viewing to prevent obesity: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 1999 Oct 27;282(16):1561-7.