Healthy food choices are happy food choices: Evidence from a real life sample using smartphone based assessments.

Research suggests that “healthy” food choices such as eating fruits and vegetables have not only physical but also mental health benefits and might be a long-term investment in future well-being. This view contrasts with the belief that high-caloric foods taste better, make us happy, and alleviate a negative mood. To provide a more comprehensive assessment of food choice and well-being, we investigated in-the-moment eating happiness by assessing complete, real life dietary behaviour across eight days using smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment. Three main findings emerged: First, of 14 different main food categories, vegetables consumption contributed the largest share to eating happiness measured across eight days. Second, sweets on average provided comparable induced eating happiness to “healthy” food choices such as fruits or vegetables. Third, dinner elicited comparable eating happiness to snacking. These findings are discussed within the “food as health” and “food as well-being” perspectives on eating behaviour.

Introduction

When it comes to eating, researchers, the media, and policy makers mainly focus on negative aspects of eating behaviour, like restricting certain foods, counting calories, and dieting. Likewise, health intervention efforts, including primary prevention campaigns, typically encourage consumers to trade off the expected enjoyment of hedonic and comfort foods against health benefits1. However, research has shown that diets and restrained eating are often counterproductive and may even enhance the risk of long-term weight gain and eating disorders2,3. A promising new perspective entails a shift from food as pure nourishment towards a more positive and well-being centred perspective of human eating behaviour1,4,5. In this context, Block et al.4 have advocated a paradigm shift from “food as health” to “food as well-being” (p. 848).

Supporting this perspective of “food as well-being”, recent research suggests that “healthy” food choices, such as eating more fruits and vegetables, have not only physical but also mental health benefits6,7 and might be a long-term investment in future well-being8. For example, in a nationally representative panel survey of over 12,000 adults from Australia, Mujcic and Oswald8 showed that fruit and vegetable consumption predicted increases in happiness, life satisfaction, and well-being over two years. Similarly, using lagged analyses, White and colleagues9 showed that fruit and vegetable consumption predicted improvements in positive affect on the subsequent day but not vice versa. Also, cross-sectional evidence reported by Blanchflower et al.10 shows that eating fruits and vegetables is positively associated with well-being after adjusting for demographic variables including age, sex, or race11. Of note, previous research includes a wide range of time lags between actual eating occasion and well-being assessment, ranging from 24 hours9,12 to 14 days6, to 24 months8. Thus, the findings support the notion that fruit and vegetable consumption has beneficial effects on different indicators of well-being, such as happiness or general life satisfaction, across a broad range of time spans.

The contention that healthy food choices such as a higher fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with greater happiness and well-being clearly contrasts with the common belief that in particular high-fat, high-sugar, or high-caloric foods taste better and make us happy while we are eating them. When it comes to eating, people usually have a spontaneous “unhealthy = tasty” association13 and assume that chocolate is a better mood booster than an apple. According to this in-the-moment well-being perspective, consumers have to trade off the expected enjoyment of eating against the health costs of eating unhealthy foods1,4.

A wealth of research shows that the experience of negative emotions and stress leads to increased consumption in a substantial number of individuals (“emotional eating”) of unhealthy food (“comfort food”)14,15,16,17. However, this research stream focuses on emotional eating to “smooth” unpleasant experiences in response to stress or negative mood states, and the mood-boosting effect of eating is typically not assessed18. One of the few studies testing the effectiveness of comfort food in improving mood showed that the consumption of “unhealthy” comfort food had a mood boosting effect after a negative mood induction but not to a greater extent than non-comfort or neutral food19. Hence, even though people may believe that snacking on “unhealthy” foods like ice cream or chocolate provides greater pleasure and psychological benefits, the consumption of “unhealthy” foods might not actually be more psychologically beneficial than other foods.

However, both streams of research have either focused on a single food category (fruit and vegetable consumption), a single type of meal (snacking), or a single eating occasion (after negative/neutral mood induction). Accordingly, it is unknown whether the boosting effect of eating is specific to certain types of food choices and categories or whether eating has a more general boosting effect that is observable after the consumption of both “healthy” and “unhealthy” foods and across eating occasions. Accordingly, in the present study, we investigated the psychological benefits of eating that varied by food categories and meal types by assessing complete dietary behaviour across eight days in real life.

Furthermore, previous research on the impact of eating on well-being tended to rely on retrospective assessments such as food frequency questionnaires8,10 and written food diaries9. Such retrospective self-report methods rely on the challenging task of accurately estimating average intake or remembering individual eating episodes and may lead to under-reporting food intake, particularly unhealthy food choices such as snacks7,20. To avoid memory and bias problems in the present study we used ecological momentary assessment (EMA)21 to obtain ecologically valid and comprehensive real life data on eating behaviour and happiness as experienced in-the-moment.

In the present study, we examined the eating happiness and satisfaction experienced in-the-moment, in real time and in real life, using a smartphone based EMA approach. Specifically, healthy participants were asked to record each eating occasion, including main meals and snacks, for eight consecutive days and rate how tasty their meal/snack was, how much they enjoyed it, and how pleased they were with their meal/snack immediately after each eating episode. This intense recording of every eating episode allows assessing eating behaviour on the level of different meal types and food categories to compare experienced eating happiness across meals and categories. Following the two different research streams, we expected on a food category level that not only “unhealthy” foods like sweets would be associated with high experienced eating happiness but also “healthy” food choices such as fruits and vegetables. On a meal type level, we hypothesised that the happiness of meals differs as a function of meal type. According to previous contention, snacking in particular should be accompanied by greater happiness.

Results

Eating episodes

Overall, during the study period, a total of 1,044 completed eating episodes were reported (see also Table 1). On average, participants rated their eating happiness with M = 77.59 which suggests that overall eating occasions were generally positive. However, experienced eating happiness also varied considerably between eating occasions as indicated by a range from 7.00 to 100.00 and a standard deviation of SD = 16.41.

Table 1 Descriptive statistics for eating happiness by meal type and food category.

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Food categories and experienced eating happiness

All eating episodes were categorised according to their food category based on the German Nutrient Database (German: Bundeslebensmittelschlüssel), which covers the average nutritional values of approximately 10,000 foods available on the German market and is a validated standard instrument for the assessment of nutritional surveys in Germany. As shown in Table 1, eating happiness differed significantly across all 14 food categories, F(13, 2131) = 1.78, p = 0.04. On average, experienced eating happiness varied from 71.82 (SD = 18.65) for fish to 83.62 (SD = 11.61) for meat substitutes. Post hoc analysis, however, did not yield significant differences in experienced eating happiness between food categories, p ≥ 0.22. Hence, on average, “unhealthy” food choices such as sweets (M = 78.93, SD = 15.27) did not differ in experienced happiness from “healthy” food choices such as fruits (M = 78.29, SD = 16.13) or vegetables (M = 77.57, SD = 17.17). In addition, an intraclass correlation (ICC) of ρ = 0.22 for happiness indicated that less than a quarter of the observed variation in experienced eating happiness was due to differences between food categories, while 78% of the variation was due to differences within food categories.

However, as Figure 1 (left side) depicts, consumption frequency differed greatly across food categories. Frequently consumed food categories encompassed vegetables which were consumed at 38% of all eating occasions (n = 400), followed by dairy products with 35% (n = 366), and sweets with 34% (n = 356). Conversely, rarely consumed food categories included meat substitutes, which were consumed in 2.2% of all eating occasions (n = 23), salty extras (1.5%, n = 16), and pastries (1.3%, n = 14).

Figure 1

Left side: Average experienced eating happiness (colour intensity: darker colours indicate greater happiness) and consumption frequency (size of the cycle) for the 14 food categories. Right side: Absolute share of the 14 food categories in total experienced eating happiness.

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Amount of experienced eating happiness by food category

To account for the frequency of consumption, we calculated and scaled the absolute experienced eating happiness according to the total sum score. As shown in Figure 1 (right side), vegetables contributed the biggest share to the total happiness followed by sweets, dairy products, and bread. Clustering food categories shows that fruits and vegetables accounted for nearly one quarter of total eating happiness score and thus, contributed to a large part of eating related happiness. Grain products such as bread, pasta, and cereals, which are main sources of carbohydrates including starch and fibre, were the second main source for eating happiness. However, “unhealthy” snacks including sweets, salty extras, and pastries represented the third biggest source of eating related happiness.