Incidental exposure to hedonic and healthy food features affects food preferences one day later

• Autor(a) principal: Dutriaux, Léo
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Papies, Esther K., Fallon, Jennifer, Garcia-Marques, Leonel, Barsalou, Lawrence W.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/63112
• topic: Eating; Food preference; Food exposure; Habits; Incidental learning; Indirect memory

Memories acquired incidentally from exposure to food information in the environment may often become active to later afect food preferences. Because conscious use of these memories is not requested or required, these inciden‑ tal learning efects constitute a form of indirect memory. In an experiment using a novel food preference paradigm (n=617), we found that brief incidental exposure to hedonic versus healthy food features indirectly afected food preferences a day later, explaining approximately 10% of the variance in preferences for tasty versus healthy foods. It follows that brief incidental exposure to food information can afect food preferences indirectly for at least a day. When hedonic and health exposure were each compared to a no-exposure baseline, a general efect of hedonic exposure emerged across individuals, whereas health exposure only afected food preferences for high-BMI individu‑ als. This pattern suggests that focusing attention on hedonic food features engages common afective processes across the general population, whereas focusing attention on healthy food features engages eating restraint goals associated with high BMI. Additionally, incidental exposure to food features primarily changed preferences for infre‑ quently consumed foods, having less impact on habitually consumed foods. These fndings ofer insight into how hedonic information in the obesogenic food environment contributes to unhealthy eating behavior that leads to overweight and obesity. These fndings further motivate the development of interventions that counteract the efects of exposure to hedonic food information and that broaden the efects of exposure to healthy food information.