Appealing to Emotional Eating

It’s late at night and one of those fast food commercials flashes its newest, beefiest burger on the screen. It looks beautiful. The patty is fire-grilled, the tomatoes juicy and fully ripened, the lettuce and onions look crisp, the fresh bun looks like it’s just come out of the oven.

Whether it’s a pizza, a hot fudge sundae, a foot-long sub or a bowl of fresh pasta, restaurants sure have a way of making mouths water.
And that is exactly the point of these commercials, to appeal to the emotions of consumers – consumers who will cave in to their cravings and go out and buy that greater than great grinder or that sinfully sensational sundae. But advertisers’ efforts are in vain if consumers have a grasp of their emotions and can separate their emotional self from their rational self. At least that’s what a group of researchers have discovered in their analysis of this phenomenon.

To assess participants’ “emotional intelligence” when it comes to food and how restaurants “package,” if you will, their array of delectable dishes, University of Kentucky researchers had participants choose their meal plans from a list of foods that had both healthy and unhealthy options. But before doing this, they assessed the participants’ nutritional knowledge, their self-confidence and how much control they had over their emotions (in other words, how much did emotions impact their decision making). Now, normally, one would think that one’s nutritional IQ would play a big role in the decisions made about proper eating. But that wasn’t the case with this study. The researchers found that the people who made the worst decisions – choosing foods that were less nutritionally sound than the others – were those who relied too much on their emotions, the very emotions that restaurants and food makers appeal to when advertising these foods. These participants had what the researchers called an “emotional miscalibration” in their meal choices.

The researchers’ second study corroborated the first. Based on an online survey taken by a number of obese volunteers, researchers found that this “emotional miscalibration” left obese people more susceptible to impulsive eating. And impulsive eating tends to be with foods high in calories and fat (Perhaps there are some impulsive fresh fruit and vegetable eaters, but that’s not what the researchers are referring to when they talk about impulsive eating).

Writing in the Journal of Consumer Research, the University of Kentucky researchers conclude, “Faced with choices between healthy and unhealthy food options, individuals who are confident that they can appropriately interpret and employ their emotions, but who do not actually possess these emotional abilities, are likely to make low-quality decisions.”

A very wise man I know talks a lot about happiness. He says that while it’s OK to be unhappy and that we all deal with unhappiness from time to time, it’s important that we not act on that unhappiness. The same can be applied to understanding our emotions and eating behaviors. While it’s OK and completely normal to be drawn to foods that appeal to our gastronomic desires, we need to be careful not to act on those desires when nutrition disasters flash screen.

A treat every now and then is fine, but it’s important not to act impulsively on emotional appeals to our appetites, especially if we possess the ability to recognize such appeals for what they are – health hazards dressed in sheep’s clothing. As the researchers discovered, not everyone has that ability.