Abstract
The primary goal of this study is to be able to discern specific types of consumers in terms of their psychosocial characteristics who may need different ways of receiving dietary advice. Knowing these types will enable a better fit of advice to consumers’ psychosocial characteristics, hereby stimulating healthy eating as the probability of compliance to the advice can potentially increase. The study draws upon several psychological theories to distinguish unique underlying factors that can subsequently be used to personalize nutrition information for consumers. A number of general psychological scales (self-regulation, action and coping self-efficacy, social comparison, intrinsic motivation, health info processing, need for cognition and for affect, and regulatory focus) are filled out by 988 respondents, including their preferences for receiving personalized forms of nutrition advice. The set of joint items from various psychological constructs is analyzed using a Principal Component Analysis to find underlying psychological characteristics. The PCA produces four components (explaining 51% of variation), that could be interpreted as ‘intrinsic interest and capabilities for healthy eating,’ ‘perceived difficulty to eat healthily,’ ‘self-worth insecurity,’ and ‘seeking positive challenges,’ respectively. By means of a Logistic Regression these components are able to predict preferences for different forms of receiving nutrition advice. This first component shows that a mind set for maintaining a healthy diet goes together with an interest in receiving an advice on what do to and on how that will affect one’s health. The second component predicts a preference for a fixed moment to receive information/advice. This may be a strategy of those that perceive difficulties to eat healthily, to help them control their healthy food intake. The insecurity that the third component models seems to lead to a wish for receiving specific advice about their health situation at fixed moments in time. The fourth component is a small component, therefore its prediction of a wish for an advice focussing on prevention of negative consequences is probably not a strong result. The study does point out that there appear different psychosocial types of consumers, that may benefit by being addressed according to their preference for receiving nutrition advice on specific moments, of a specific level of detail or pointing at the type of consequences the advice has. A better fit of the advice to the psychosocial characteristics of the recipient, captured in the identified components in the current study, may lead to an increase in compliance, although that will have to be further investigated in subsequent work.
Highlights
Many people in the Western world currently have an unhealthy lifestyle, which in part is the result of consumers’ diets which overall are relatively unhealthy
The concept of personalized nutrition in this study entails that nutrition information is provided to consumers taking into account some of their psychological characteristics
We extend previous work that shows a relation between psychological characteristics and both dietary choices (e.g., Mayer and Tormala, 2010; Ludolph and Schulz, 2015; Macready et al, 2018) and compliance with personalized advice (Berezowska et al, 2015; Livingstone et al, 2016; Celis-Morales et al, 2017; Rankin et al, 2017; Reinders et al, 2020) and aim to develop a psychological approach to personalize nutrition information based on an elaborate questionnaire (Macready et al, 2018)
Summary
Many people in the Western world currently have an unhealthy lifestyle, which in part is the result of consumers’ diets which overall are relatively unhealthy For instance because they consume too much meat, have a high (saturated) fat intake, and consume too little fruits and vegetables (Bray and Popkin, 1998; Pomerleau et al, 2005). One type of approach to persuade consumers to eat more healthily is to provide consumers with nutrition information (e.g., Block and Peracchio, 2006; Glanz et al, 2012; Wendel et al, 2013) This nutrition information can be provided to consumers in a generic manner, where all consumers receive the same information (in terms of content and form), or in a more personalized manner. Overall, personalizing nutrition information has been shown to be more effective in affecting consumers’ food choices than providing consumers with generic nutrition information (e.g., Brug et al, 2003; Elder et al, 2009; Livingstone et al, 2016; CelisMorales et al, 2017), which demonstrates the potential of personalized nutrition advice as a strategy to reduce the incidence of diseases and health costs (Stewart-Knox et al, 2016)
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