Paths to Healthier Eating: Perceptions and Interventions for Success

Abstract

ealthy eating is highly relevant to multiple stakeholders, from consumers to marketers to policy makers. Every consumer makes food decisions daily; food is a $2.5 trillion industry worldwide (Fortune Business Insights 2022), and promoting healthier eating is a major public policy issue given rising obesity rates in most countries. Interest in understanding, more generally, the role of food decision making in consumers’ lives has increased in conjunction with these societal trends. We believe that consumer research has an important role to play in understanding and shaping food decision making to produce positive outcomes for as many constituents as possible, because of its unique ability to straddle the line between consumer welfare and implications for the producers and marketers of food products. This special issue of JACR seeks to add new insights to our understanding of interventions to increase healthy eating by (1) reflecting on what healthy eating means through the lens of consumers’ perceptions of what they should do to eat healthy, (2) increasing our understanding of the methods used to test healthy eating interventions, and (3) examining whether and when various healthy eating interventions are actually effective at leading to healthier eating. Understanding what healthy eating means to consumers is important as consumers use their own interpretations of “healthy” when making daily decisions about food consumption (Ronteltap et al. 2012). Accordingly, we begin with a discussion of how healthy eating is understood, expressed, and operationalized, introducing a framework of key paths to healthy eating and presenting insights from a survey of consumers. We then consider the evidence about which interventions actually work (or do not work) at leading to healthier eating. We present key findings from the special issue articles, which are organized into four