If you look around, do you find it easier to get a soft drink than a piece of fruit? Do you have places where you can buy healthy food? Is there a nearby area where you can play sports? Can you walk anywhere? The obesogenic environment It is defined as the sum of influences that the environment, opportunities or living conditions have on the promotion of obesity in individuals or populations. They are all those factors that lead us to make food choices that do not correspond to what is considered a healthy diet and lifestyle. Granite by granite, an environment is being configured in which following the healthy guidelines that you know by heart is an obstacle course that is more difficult than completing the Pass word.
The supermarket also makes its contribution to the obesogenic environment, something especially important if we take into account that, according to the report Study of consumer trends of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, it is in the supermarket where we make 54.2% of perishable food purchases and 77% of non-perishable food purchases. In the market we only buy 11.4% of fresh food and, logically, very little non-perishable food: 1.4%. To accentuate the relevance that the point of sale has in our choices, it is estimated that more than half of the purchase decisions we make in the supermarket are not planned. Let us not forget that it is an environment in which strategies are applied that encompass the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, promotion and placement -placement in English- and there is evidence that suggests that they are mainly directed to buy unhealthy products.
Translated to your daily life: a large part of the food you buy on impulse in a shelf overflowing with unhealthy products designed to be put in the cart. But, in a tactic typical of martial arts, could it be turned around and take advantage of that ability to influence for good?
Change environments to change decisions
If the environment that surrounds us determines our consumption habits, changing it can be a spring that modifies our choices. is what in behavioral economics it is known as “choice architecture”, a term coined by Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017 for his analyzes of decision making.
To find out how changes in physical environments affect health-related choices (alcohol, tobacco and food consumption), a tool has been developed. defined in the magazine Nature Human Behavior, the TIPPME (typology of interventions in proximal physical micro-environments). This system classifies the interventions that can be made on the product, nearby objects and the general environment, and differentiates them into two types:
Location: they can be actions on availability -include or eliminate products to increase, reduce or modify the available categories, the variety or the number, such as expanding the space that some products occupy on the shelves- or on the position (change the location, proximity or accessibility of products, for example, placing them in the most prominent places: near entrances, at the end of aisles, next to the checkout or at eye level).
Product properties: these are changes to its functionality -the way it is used, its design-, presentation (visual, olfactory, tactile characteristics), size or shape and information it contains; like the one on the label.
What differentiates this approach from other sales strategies? Two important nuances: economic incentives are not used, such as offers, and options are not prohibited or eliminated (pastries, soft drinks and pre-cooked foods are still at your disposal).
Can the products be placed in the supermarket to persuade you to buy bananas instead of hooks?
I’m not telling you anything you don’t sense: there are areas of the supermarket that are the golden mile in a grocery version. Quality studies published in the British Journal of Nutrition or in Current Nutrition Reports; to name a few, they have found that, indeed, placing products in the most sought-after areas of the supermarket – near the checkouts, at eye level or at the end of the aisles – improves their visibility and increases sales.
These persuasion techniques have their interesting angle, because they could be used to fill your car with broccoli, chard and cooked chickpeas. A 180-degree turn so that the location of the products serves as a hook for us to make healthy choices and you end up with a shopping basket that would make any nutritionist cry with joy (believe me, we need it). Would it be effective?
This is what has been tried to find out in different systematic reviews of the scientific literature -such as is either is– with exciting, but not conclusive results. It does seem that if healthy foods occupy the best positions in the supermarket and unhealthy foods are left in the least attractive places, it is easier for us to make positive choices for our health and eat a healthier diet. But much of the evidence isn’t statistically significant, in part because the studies are small, heterogeneous, and many aren’t done under real-world conditions: that is, in the supermarket. Even so, the reviews consider that the combination of the two faces of the location – accessibility and position – should be taken into account due to its potential to modify our purchases and dietary patterns.
In the recently published study on altering product placement to create a healthier layout in supermarkets A possible explanation is offered for why these strategies do not have the expected impact when put into practice. Enlarging the fruit and vegetable area and bringing it closer to the entrance, together with the removal of unhealthy products from the most visible areas, has a positive effect on health, but the marketing of unhealthy products is ubiquitous, it appears everywhere within the supermarket and makes them end up in the car (and in our stomach).
Those who want you to eat badly; and, what is worse, those who want you to eat badly thinking you eat well – unhealthy products Light, enriched and various Trojan horses I refer-, have many more resources. They launch omnipresent messages -advertisements in the press, in every corner of the city, on banners on your mobile, in promoted posts on the rrss- and they place their nutritional monstrosities behind every corner so that, at the slightest roar of your guts, you do not hesitate to hold on to a cereal bar or a bag of chips without moving more than ten steps.
Do consumers want strategies that help us buy better?
Among the actions that the United Kingdom is going to implement to reduce obesity, is restricting the presence of some products in the prominent areas of the supermarket. It is anticipated that the The measure comes into force in October this year. The scool of “Who told you that I want you to drive for me?” and of the tweets with photos of fritanga Before any health recommendation, he is already hyperventilating seeing a new interference that restricts his freedom to burst his arteries as he pleases.
You can rest assured, José Luis, that no one is going to take away your cognac or the ultra-perpetrated ones – a term coined by the immense Laura Caori– of the linear. In fact, they are already conditioning your choices by placing insane products in the best places, and that hasn’t bothered you. It’s about making healthy choice just a little bit more intuitive; not even “the most”, and that buying in the supermarket is not a test of asceticism that requires having a master’s degree in nutrition and a postgraduate degree in food labeling.
In fact, when this idea is presented, most consumers agree. This is the conclusion reached by a study on the public support for healthy supermarket initiatives focused on product placement After asking more than 22,000 people in five countries for their opinion on three initiatives related to product placement: expanding the fresh and healthy food area, putting healthy food in the checkout areas and reducing the presence of soft drinks and unhealthy food in the end of the corridors.
Of course we can choose not to put the croissants in the basket. Of course no one is forcing us to take instant noodles with us. But to think that our food choices are as free as the sun at sunrise is unreal, innocent and, if you push me, has its point of vanity (no, you are not immune to these strategies). We are all conditioned by hundreds of factors, also by what we see at the point of sale: it is about being aware of it and, if it is not too much to ask, that they make it a little less difficult for us.
Beatrice Robles She is a food technologist, dietitian-nutritionist and obsessed with fighting misinformation. Teacher in the Degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics at the Isabel I University and scientific communicator, she has published the book Eat safe eating everything, to help you not mess up in the kitchen and eat safely.
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