There are people in this world who genuinely love vegetables. Some snack on frozen broccoli straight from the bag. Others crave carrots, adore asparagus, and even finish their kale without being bribed, begged, or threatened.
Then there are the rest of us. Sure, a vegetable-rich diet lowers your risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, certain cancers, and more. But why do they have to taste so … vegetal?
Kids are notoriously picky in the vegetable department, but adults have a lot of room to improve as well. Nearly 90 percent of the U.S. population doesn’t eat enough vegetables. Could anything make us change our ways?
“Just giving people the information is not sufficient. If you really want to get some behavior change, you have to make it easy for people to do,” says John Hayes, a food scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. “If food does not taste good, people will not eat it.”
True.
But there may yet be hope for us vegetable skeptics. Scientists are coming up with ways to cajole you into eating your veggies. Some involve a little bit of manipulation, while others focus on making the vegetables themselves taste better.
“We’re going to contribute to being healthier without having to try to make people eat stuff they don’t want to eat,” says Linda Bartoshuk, an experimental psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Here’s how psychology and flavor science can up your vegetable ante.
Everybody’s doing it
Vegetables make up the category of foods that we acquire a taste for most slowly, Bartoshuk says. The foods we classify as vegetables are both less sweet and more bitter than fruits, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage from the get-go.
“Humans are preprogrammed to find sweet tastes very rewarding and very appetizing, because sweetness normally signifies calories and energy,” says Jason Thomas, a psychologist at Aston University in Birmingham, England. Bitterness, on the other hand, can signal that a plant is poisonous. “In the wild, bitter foods could easily kill us, so we have it wired into our physiology as well to try to avoid those foods.”
That’s not an easy hurdle for vegetables to overcome. “We try to educate people about what’s healthy. That sure didn’t work,” Bartoshuk says. “We all know better than to eat what we do, but does it affect our behavior?”
Generally, no. However, drawing people’s attention to other’s choices may nudge them to make healthy decisions as well. Thomas and his colleagues tracked subjects' vegetable intake after they encountered an educational poster in the lab or at a workplace restaurant. “If we tell students that other students eat plenty of fruit and veg, they tend to eat more themselves,” he says.
This is even true for cruciferous vegetables, a family that has a bad rap for bitterness. Perversely, its members are also packed with nutrients. “We specifically targeted broccoli because we considered it to be the most hard-sell vegetable,” Thomas says.
Unsurprisingly, we’re also influenced by what we see on social media. When people view Instagram posts that have garnered many likes, they tend to eat more of whatever foods were featured in the images. If “you have lots of cakes appearing that are heavily liked on your Instagram feed, you might end up eating a lot more of them yourself without ever meaning to, or even being aware of the link there,” Thomas says. But he thinks this could work with vegetables as well.
It might be difficult to get people to keep this behavior up in the long term, though. “So far unfortunately from our studies it doesn’t seem like we can easily nudge people’s enjoyment of food,” Thomas says. “We can get them to eat more broccoli, but it doesn’t look like at the moment we can get them to like it more.”
But that might come eventually. “We know generally that if you expose people to a food they do like it more over time,” Thomas says.
Source: https://steemit.com/scientist/@shubh34/here-s-how-scientists-are-tricking-you-into-eating-your-veggies
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