How Nature Nudges Us to Eat Better

You are listening to a podcast from INSEAD, the Business School for the World. Welcome to the INSEAD Knowledge Podcast, where our faculty address issues facing business and society. I'm Katie Scott, senior editor, and I'm joined by Pierre Chendon, the loyal chair professor of marketing innovation and creativity at INSEAD. Pierre is also director of the INSEAD Soulburn University Behavioral Lab. Today, Pierre will be demystifying healthy food choices and explaining the surprising role that nature plays in what we choose to eat. Welcome Pierre. Thank you. So Pierre, these days, just about every food product on the shelf claims to be healthy, but consumers aren't convinced. Could you help clear some of the confusion around what healthy even actually means? Yes, you're right about this. It's almost impossible to buy food in a supermarket. It doesn't seem to be healthy one way or the other. And what we thought is important is to realize that healthy can actually mean very different things. So with a former corothos, Romancadario, who is a semi-rotidam, we tried to look at the four ways products claimed to be healthy. And the first dimension is to emphasize either what's good in the product, the presence of good, or the absence of bad. So we have things like products that are enriched because they're high in vitamins and fibers, or products that are low in salt sugar and fat. But this first distinction is the traditional distinction. It's based on the idea that we look at the composition, the nutrients of the products, and we add good or remove bad, and we have a better product. And this is not the way consumers really think about healthiness nowadays. Instead of improving the product by adding good or removing bad, which we call the nutrition or science-based ways to be healthy. What consumers are really looking at now are products that claim to be healthy because they have preserved the natural characteristics of the food. So these are products that have not added anything bad, who haven't not removed anything good. In this category, we have products that are all the clean labels, without pesticides, without artificial colors, et cetera. And finally, we have the products that claim to be healthy because they haven't removed anything good. These are four very different ways to claim to be healthy. So some brands claim to be healthy because they've improved the nutritional properties, while others claim to be healthy by nature, in that they've preserved the food's natural characteristics. How could we use this link to nature to make healthier food choices? Because consumers are less and less interested in the nutritional approach or better or worse, what brands can do is to emphasize the naturalness of the products, the fact that it's unprocessed and we haven't removed anything bad or added anything wrong. And what we looked in another study with a former PhD student in Seattle, Maria Longloua, was that foods that emphasize or retailers, or in fact, anyone at home who emphasizes proximity to nature can nudge consumers or children or anyone to actually prefer healthier food. And this is quite important because we've known for a while that proximity to nature is associated with lots of good things, you know, healthier lives, longer lives, et cetera. But we didn't really know why. And I think our research shows that it's actually the fact that nature makes us want to eat more healthy, that may explain why people who live closer to nature tend to have healthier lives. Okay, so tell me more about this study. It sounds fascinating. What's the story behind it? So the story behind it is that Maria had been a long distance biker, she was doing long distance, basically, basically rides. And she noticed that when her group was in a natural park, they all wanted healthy food like an apple. But when they were going through CDs and suburbs, they all wanted to go to fast food restaurants. And so we tested this in many studies. One of the studies had people go and walk in a park in Paris and other people were doing the same distance, but in neighboring streets. And at the end of both walks, they were invited to buffet where they could eat, you know, different kinds of food. And what we found is that people who walked in the streets, 39% of their choices were unhealthy snacks, cookies, and things like that. Whereas those who had done the same walk in the park, 70% of those snacks were natural things like apples and fruits. And we replicated this effect in many other studies and we found that it's just enough to actually have a scenery of nature or urban to make a difference in people's choices. Provided that the nature is a green nature, you know, which you show photos with snow, for example, then the effect disappears. Right. So if I'm sitting by myself and I don't have any windows, but I put up a picture of a tree. Will that change how would I choose to eat? So if, you know, it depends, of course, how strongly involved you are in this contemplation of the natural view. And, you know, not every natural view probably will work. But in general, what we find is that the natural view makes people more willing to trade off tastes and diets for natural healthy food. For example, in one of the studies, we showed people photos of nature and this were different photos, you know, but they were all about something green. And when people were exposed to this natural scenery, 73% of their choices were healthy snacks. Whereas when other people were shown photos of urban streets, which were nice streets, you know, nothing special. But then the choice of healthy food went down to 33%. And so what we actually found is that, you know, big effects could be generated by changing the environment without actually telling people to eat better or shaming them. Or, you know, doing any education around the importance of nutrition. That's really important because we know that educational approaches generally don't work as well as we expected. Or to be more specific, they work for people who already care about health and nutrition. And the difficulty in the field is to try to find ways to convince people who are not particularly interested in health and nutrition to make better food choices. Right. So how could we apply these findings? How could companies use what you found in the study to try and nudge people to make better choices? So if you're selling healthy food, you know, clearly having a natural scenery is the way to go. But also, I think this would have implication for restaurants and retailers. And we've seen one more restaurants, for example, that have a greenery inside the restaurants. And, you know, our results suggest that it would nudge people to choose healthy food. But we also found probably, I mean, I would probably imagine the same effects would also occur at home because it's really probably something very deep disconnection to nature that we have. It's not exactly understood why exactly it works. You know, it could be stress relief. It could be a sense of awe that we have on a close to nature. But there are probably many reasons that make us really wants to eat better and take more care of our bodies when we're in close proximity, when we're surrounded by nature. And that ties in nicely with the first study you mentioned about consumers wanting the nature based claims on food products. Could you tell me a bit more about that study and what you tested and what you found? Yes, so what's interesting is that the four ways to claim to be healthy as we discuss, but these different communications have very different impacts on people's beliefs. For example, you know, we have always this fear that, oh, if the food is healthy, maybe it's less tasty. Well, that's only true for one kind of way to be healthy, the diet way, you know, the way where we say have less of a soul sugar and fat. And people thinking, well, maybe it's not as tasty as a true original version. And the other ways to be healthy, for example, the way that say I'm healthy by nature because I have preserved the natural characteristics of the food, then people don't think the food will be less tasty. In fact, it could be tastier. And so what we actually show is that it's really important to target the kind of message with the consumers that you have. It's not enough to say I'm healthy, you know, you have to be healthy in the right way. Okay, go on. What is healthy in the right way mean for different consumers? So if some consumers were looking to lose weight or maintaining weight, then products that claim to have less of the bad, you know, low in this and that, that's the way to go. But for consumers who want a healthier diet in general, then the natural base ways to be healthy are probably better. And then there are also cultural differences. We actually looked at cereals in both France and United States. And we found that the way French cereals claim to be healthy tends to be well adjusted to what consumers wanted. But it was not the case in United States. So how did French cereals present the healthy claims on their packaging compared to the American? So in France, for example, on average, most of the claims were based on nature. And whereas in the United States, there was a big lack of one particular type of claim. The claims that you're healthy because of the presence of good, these are claims around the enrichment of the food, what you've added, vitamins or minerals or fibers and things like that. These were actually claims that American consumers really liked. And when I talk to the industry, it seems like, you know, they took it for granted that, you know, cereals or constraints of sort of good things. And you know, this is just one example among many showing how it's not enough to say, oh, we have a portfolio of products that are healthy. They have to be healthy specifically in the way that consumers are expect in their own country and also probably in the category because it depends by category. And so on the French packaging, it says what organic whole wheat are these the type of healthy by nature claims that they're making? Yes, and you could find those claims, you know, in US as well. The big difference was the lack of fortification claims in the US cereal brands, which are claims that American consumers liked. And so, and this is just one example because you know, you could look at different countries, you could look at different categories. I think the value of our approach is to have this simple, you know, two by two. Look at how the claim is made. Is it because of the presence of good or the absence of bad? Is it because they have improved the food through better nutrition or is it because they have preserved the natural qualities of the food? These are four ways that you can claim to be healthy that can be used to better target what consumers want in different countries. Okay, and so just to recap, we found that you found that in France, the claims that food producers made and marketers made were more in line with what consumers wanted. Whereas in America, there was a misalignment and a mismatch for the cereal category. I mean, we cannot really generalize. And what's interesting is that, you know, these were the same companies, you know, operating in both sides of the Atlantic is just really a misalignment, which could be easily corrected. And, you know, the general takeaway here is that we need to move beyond just, you know, health versus taste. We need to really do a homework and try to understand more precisely what kind of healthiness we're talking about. And for which consumers in which categories? And by doing that, we'll be able to really leverage the increasing interest for health, which is happening around the world. Absolutely. And so I can see the easy takeaway for in supermarkets, but what about in restaurants or cafeterias, how could we apply some of these learnings there? Oh, really, it applies to the entire food industry. You know, we tend to focus on food producers, but retailers and food service companies, restaurants and cafeteria, et cetera. They can also apply this because they also can make claims, they can choose the types of products that they will want to push. And, you know, even at home, I think it's important to understand these differences, you know, there are some studies with teenagers that found that if you tell them these vegetables are healthy and full of antioxidants, it actually reduces the likelihood that teenagers will take them because they say, oh, you know, if there's some full of nutrition, they're probably not so tasty. So instead of saying that they are full of antioxidants, you can emphasize their natural where they're made or even why not, how they taste, you know, there are many ways you can actually be more effective in how you get people to eat better. And this is really what we're looking at here at INSEAD in the studies we conduct in the field and online is to find better ways to get people to eat better. And at the same time, that is not, you know, anti-business that companies can leverage and by companies, I mean the producers, the retailers and the restaurants. Right, okay, tell me a little bit more about how you conduct the research. I know your director of the INSEAD Sorbonne University Behavioral Lab. What kind of fascinating ways do you find out how people, you know, prefer one food ever another or all these types of things? So we really use all the tools that are available, you know, we do online studies because they're very fast and relatively cheap, but you write that we use the lab a lot because there's a huge difference, especially in food, especially when you measure healthy food between what people say they do and what they actually do in real life. So in the lab, for example, we would show them different photos of either natural or urban settings or we, in other studies, we had them watch football or soccer games where their favorite team had either one or lost. And as they're watching the game, you know, they can nimble on either cherry tomatoes or some chocolate candies and then we measure what they actually eat. But we don't just stay in the lab, we also conduct studies in the field, we would do the study in the park, for example, like the one I mentioned, or we collaborate with retailers to have access to the data or restaurants, you know, we're just doing a study now, we're looking at the effect of nutrition labels in fast food restaurants. So just the same way we did in supermarkets, I think what's really important, that's one of the things we can do well, I didn't see it, is to have all the different ways you can study a phenomenon from super controlled in the lab, super fast online, to super real in real life. And we need all these approaches to be confident about what we're saying. Right, tell me a little bit more about nutrition labels in supermarkets, what did you find there that they don't work, they work, people ignore them or actually take them into account. So this was a really big study we did with a group of colleagues from inside and outside, at the request of the French Health Minister, and we tested four different front of back nutrition labels, including the British multiple traffic light, the Nutri score that was eventually adopted in France and six other countries and two other labels. We tested that in 60 supermarkets, you know, 1.46 million, I forgot exactly labels were actually fixed manually on products in four categories, it was a really huge study. And what was really fascinating is to find that in a number one, Nutri score was the label that worked the best because it's the simplest, it is just one to understand, but all the labels had one strange unexpected result, which was that they really helped good products. Like if you have a Nutri score A and B, you saw the sales increase, but they didn't really reduce the sales of the bad products bad by that, I mean those with a lower nutritional quality. And when you think about it, it actually makes sense post hoc, of course, you know, those labels, they work for people who care about nutrition and people who buy products that are not so high in terms of nutrition have revealed they care about something else, like price and taste and just the habits. And so it's normal, but it's also showing how hard it actually is to nurture people to eat better. And I think more generally what these labels have shown is, you know, they're useful, we should implement them because consumers want them even fast food restaurants. Their effect is not as high as we hope they would be because it's hard to change behaviors. But at the same time, they also encourage the producers to reformulate the food to improve them, which is why overall I mean favor of them, but we also need to be careful and realize they won't solve the healthy eating problem. Because like I like to say is that healthy eating is not so much a knowing problem, I mean you and I know we're supposed to eat more fruits and vegetables and drink more water, etc. It's not really a knowing problem as much as a doing problem. And that's why I think it's important to look at other nudges, other approaches that don't leverage and don't talk about health and nutrition. And this is something else which hopefully will have a time to discuss in another podcast, for example, I have a big belief we're using pleasure and taste as the ally of healthy eating and telling people to actually focus on taste as this will nudge them to its in moderation, the tasty but not so healthy desserts that we love. Okay, well let's move on to what consumers can do to help themselves make better healthier choices. So based on these two studies that we've been discussing about being in nature and also about understanding what healthy means to you and what actually how it's being marketed to you, what can we as consumers do to eat healthier? Okay, so that's the question they know. Number one, I would say you need to be careful about all the health claims and even in general the branding of some of the products. If you look at it with a bit of perspective, the healthiest products in the supermarket are those that don't claim to be healthy. I'm talking about fruits and vegetables because there's very little marketing behind them unfortunately. And so we need to learn to look at the labels and in the same way we need to learn to look at prices and quantity. And I think once we have done that part, then I think more generally we need to realize that we are much more influenced by our environment as we like to believe. Healthy eating is not really only about willpower. People who eat healthy, don't have that much more willpower, they have just engineered their environment to avoid having to resist temptation because like Oscar Wilde famously said, you know, I can resist anything except temptations, it's really hard to resist temptations, you know, we're not good at this. So the idea is that if you change your environment, you don't have the unhealthy food that are readily available at home. Maybe you try to eat in a context that is stress-free, so not in front of your computer, not in the car, not in front of the television or as you're looking at your phone. Especially if you're lucky enough to have a nice view, all of this will actually help you make better decisions without forcing you to make difficult trade-offs. You'll find it comes naturally, which is really the way to go. And in terms of building trust between consumers and food marketers, what can the food marketers and companies do to build better trust with their consumers in terms of how they label their food? Yeah, this is a really important question because there's very little trust between consumers and marketers, you know, sometimes strangely, because if you look at the grand scheme of things, we have access now to an unprecedented supply of tasty and safe, which is not the given and relatively cheap food, which is good, you know, compared to what people had access to some time ago. But I think the way to restore the trust for the food industry is, first of all, to be more transparent. Let's take another example, which is shrink-flation, you know, how sometimes products have reduced the quantity and kept the price. There's nothing actually legal or even more really wrong with doing that when you are a food producer. You have to decide not just on the price, but on the quantity if I'm selling sandwiches, I need to decide how much I will charge for them, but also how big the sandwiches. But there's no reason that price and quantity should be treated differently. But the reason why people were really upset about shrink-flation and reduction of quantity is that because it was hidden, because, you know, typically it was in the, of course, you didn't lie about it, but it was in the back of the pack or the bag itself was the same size, but the quantity inside was smaller. But I think if you are transparent about it and you say, look, I've reduced the quantity, yes, you know, it's not as much as before, but would you have rather that I increased the price? Because, you know, I have somehow to pass the increase in cost because of the way percentages work, you know, this is something else I've studied, it's really not intuitive. But, you know, a 50% decrease in quantity is equivalent to 100% increase in price. So when you put this like this in perspective, you're like, okay, you know, maybe it's okay to have a smaller portion. But I think, at the end, really, what consumers want is to rebalance the symmetry of information. That's why they love NutriScore and all of the apps like Yuka that tell you what's inside the product. They are concerned. They are afraid. And I think what the food industry needs to do is to be very transparent because, you know, there is no reason to hide the reduction in quantity in the back. And there is also our lots of good things that the food industry has been doing that they don't get credit for because of the general distrust. Yeah, do you have a sort of best-cased example of maybe a brand or a company that's done this the right way. So we have here, I didn't see lots of very talented MBA students. And so I marked in my way one of our former MBA students has launched a company called Waterdrop, which instead of shipping sodas in plastic bottles, which is terrible for the environment and also not so great from the health and nutrition point of view. He is selling those micro drinks that are just have the vegetable extracts with taste and sometimes vitamins or electrolytes, etc. That you can add to water and it creates this drink without having to ship plastic or bottles. And you have a 98% reduction in CO2 and 99% reduction in plastic if I remember correctly. So this is an example of how innovation can improve the availability of options that are both better for you and better for the planet. And so we have lots of other options like these that are in the work that are available and that makes me proud and happy to go back to work and teach, I didn't see it every day. Absolutely. And so you mentioned earlier about what we're talking about reduction in in quantity and you've done previous research on small portions and taste and pleasure. Could you tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah, I think what's interesting is when you think about that improving your diets, we tend to focus on what we eat. And let's remove this and let's add that and we tend to neglect another very important probably even more important decision, which is how much to eat. And I think this question of portion sizes is really the sweet spot when you want like me to help align pleasure, health and nutrition and business of food business because as consumers, we tend to have much stronger preferences for what to eat. I know I don't really like broccoli, I doubt you'll be able to make me love them and some people have very strong preferences for one brand versus the other. And it's really hard to reformulate the food without touching the taste or even more generally people don't like it when you change a recipe, they want the original but people don't really know what's a regular size. I always like to explain how Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but you know all these companies for 50, 60 years, you only had one size, it was 6.5 ounce bottle or 19 centiliters. And when they introduced larger bottles like 20 ounces, which is 44 centiliters, it was introduced as a large enough for three people. And today 50 centiliters is the norm when you go to restaurants and you even buy the smallest cup, it's bigger than what used to be a normal cup for an adult not so long ago. And so sizes have increased tremendously in beverages, in food, in general. And we haven't really realized that. And we know that if you have a large cup, a large plate in front of you, you will eat more. This is one of the strongest results we know in nutrition. And so I think the idea of improving our diets by making it more attractive for us, not to eat less. You know, but to go back to selecting the options that used to be normal and that today we think are small. I think it's a very promising idea. It needs one that I'm studying a lot here at NCAD. Fantastic. Well, I'm going to go and have my lunch outside under a tree and probably have a moderate portion of something healthy and by nature. Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us today, Pierre. Thank you. It's been my pleasure. And thank you to our listeners for more business insights and thought leadership. Join us at knowledge.nciad.edu.