How Behavioral Nudges Can Improve Your Eating Habits

[00:00:08]this platter of fruits isn't exactly Cutting Edge but if I move it all the way from there to here at the start of the queue that may just make all the difference especially if we're trying to nudge people to eat healthier it's a small move for a big issue we're losing the war on Obesity take Singapore for example a decade ago only 8.6% of the people here were obese by 2020 that figure crept up to 10.5% and within just one year it jumped up by another percentage point but what if we can make a difference to those figures as well as shape our figures by focusing on not what goes into our mouths but what happens in our brains in this episode I'll be looking at some simple and cheap ways to change our eating habits for the better relying on the latest clinical studies and discoveries in Behavioral [Music] Science but before I know how we're being nudged to do it right I re I need to know what I'm up against in this modern world we live in that's making us eat wrong every day we're being nudged towards certain choices like when we shop for food products in a supermarket to find out how I might be nudged towards less healthy choices in a supermarket I've asked a health communication expert to join me on my shopping trip hey hey Prof May hi hi I'm Jason please to meet you pleas to meet you Supermarket is designed kind of like uh you know a complex ecosystem of nudes some are more positive and some are potentially negative as well there is um something called system one and system two thinking system one is is kind of a subconscious level you almost automatic type of um behaviors that can be driven by certain types of just for instance when you first come in you know typically you see a lot of fruit mountains of fruits and on the right side there's actually the greens as in the plants and supermarkets typically don't sell a lot of plants but the plants and the fresh flowers are all put there to give you the sense that you know the the supermarket carries are very fresh and very green type of produce it's very important in terms of setting the type of experience that you're expecting when you first come in these are going to be something that's good for me and my family it's going to be um healthy and so on but in system two um the consumer has to rationalize and you know compare the different labels um which are sometimes at the back of the pack sometimes even small fonts and you've really got to try and understand in order to determine um what you want to buy two systems of thinking that give rise to two types of nudging is both hidden within the Maze of options in a supermarket front of pack labels like this healthier choice one and these products placed at IE level are examples of type one nudges they rely on system one thinking to trigger automatic decisions meanwhile nutritional panels like these are type two nudges these depend on our system to thinking needing us to slow down and reflect on our [Music] choices some studies suggest that type one nudges are a lot more effective at influencing our choices because they work faster but these choices might not be the wisest for our health there's a lot of Temptation s you're getting distracted now well I really am there's ice cream here and then um pizza at the end you know definitely there were a lot of unhealthy options because you know some of the items are processed some had a lot of sugary content saturated fats and you know they calorie dance these are certainly unhealthy options interestingly right from a psychological Viewpoint we've just spent a lot of time with the fruits and vegetables we've picked up items that we think are going to help us be a little bit a bit more healthy and you know often times like by this stage you're you're thinking that oh yeah but you know sometimes I need to treat myself very tempting to pick up something from here so when the first things we see upon entering a supermarket evoke a sense of healthy eating we would likely feel less guilty about making unhealthy food choices after that and that is known as priming it's a type one nudge because when we're primed without us realizing the first impression we have of a space greatly determines every decision we make after that we've reached the bread section that was a long walk it was it was do you know that breads are typically one of the top items on everybody's shopping list there a staple on there yeah they are they are but do you notice that we didn't see any breads right at the you know the beginning of the supermarket and we a long way and it's almost right at the end because the supermarket wants you to take that tour through they encourage you to just have a little tour around the supermarket cuz you might pick other things up that's right that's right so the supermarket is clearly jam-packed with nudges but if you think about it nothing nefarious is happening all shops want you to spend more and supermarkets are no different but what disturbs me is this yes I've been primed to think the supermarket is a healthy place yes I'm being led on a long tour around the supermarket but out of everything I can pick up and spend more on at the supermarket why do I always end up picking junk food and drive away feeling happy with my splurges could our brains be wired to work against us when it comes to such food turns out a group of neuroscientists at The Institute of molecular and cell biology have been looking for answers to that very question so I'm very curious cuz I have this bowl of crisp and I know they're not very healthy for me yet I'm still very drawn to eating that bowl mhm what is it about this this effect of me wanting to eat but knowing that it's actually not very good for me we look at here which is a mouse brain when we image them using our microscope we know these cells are active at that moment but they just happen to be dopamine cells D me is called the hormone of happiness it makes me happy it will make me happy it will make me feel rewarding if I eat this things and at that moment what was this mouse doing to have this effect so in this particular case we let the animals consume some high fat diet or high fat actually also sweet food yeah and on the other hand these animals they in this case they actually just eat the normal low calorie food okay you don't really see much in this region so will my brain light up just like this yes it's similar there are equivalent cells in our human brain we have to acknowledge these things contain a lot of energy a lot of calorie which is the basis of life and through through Evolution the animals built in the gene that whenever there is something rich in energy we should just gobble it up it evolved in a way that our whole GI track we have all these different receptors distributed through it that can sense sugar that can sense lipid after sensing all these it will send those information to our brain which release dopamine and tell us this is a good thing but away from the dopamine receptors are two more groups of brain cells equally crucial to our eating Behavior reg here the MRI can image the whole brain right so we can check the connectivity strength between any brain regions tub nucleus is a cluster of neurons within the very bottom of the brain these neurons critically regulates eating behavior subiculum is part of the hpoc us hippocampus is a major region for encoding memory for integrating spatial or contactual information what we found is that if you repeatedly make the animal eat high fat high sugar diet on the certain environment the subiculum and tubal connection will be strengthened so then when the connectivity is strengthened um then simply by presenting the food in this environment the connection is strong enough to drive these tub nucleus to Fire and thus Drive the animals to eat where I work if there's a box of donuts there you you you just find yourself putting your hand in the Box even if you're not that hungry cuz it's there this highly rewarding food is present always in this office setting which go every day and if you repeatedly eat um there yes it's also very likely that appetite will be conditioned when the food is present in that context you will start to grab something even if you are not hungry which could explain why some of us might find ourselves munching on popcorn every time we watch TV because our brains have linked that environment with a certain type of food and while grazing or snacking mindlessly has become the norm for some office workers in Singapore a habit that might have attributed to a 12% jump in the number of calories consumed in Singapore now compared to about two decades ago and one of the habits will try to nudge [Music] away obesity has become increasingly common amongst Singapore residents this past decade and the biggest contributor to this increase are young adults aged 21 to 29 and middle-aged folks aged 40 to 59 those in these age groups are mostly working adults so perhaps one way to solve the Obesity problem is to tackle what they eat at work I've reached out to a team of experts in behavioral and cognitive science they'll be helping me recreate two social experiments at an office pantry and a work Buffet these were first cooked up by Google to nudge its employees towards healthier choices with positive results we've roped in two tech companies with a sizable young adult and middle-aged Workforce as our testing sites singaporeans actually spend about 45 hours a week on average working in the office um and they can develop Habits Like grazing which is essentially frequent snacking not even because I'm hungry it's just cuz I just want to find something to do and I eat the office is a right place to develop unhealthy eating habits uh but consequently it's also then a good place to start nudging people to eat healthier cuz if you're going to be snacking anyway hopefully you'll be snacking on something healthier what is the nudge that we're going to be trying here then so what we're going to do is we're going to introduce something called an obstruction or visibility nudge we're making the healthier food look more visible by putting them in these transparent boxes I see so they can see straight into this exactly yeah and then we're going to put the less healthier food in the opaque boxes so they can see it yeah so how is that hidden it's just easy for me to do this right right so actually the op peque box it needs a lid so we are going to be covering it okay now I can't see yeah now you can't see anything at all right you don't know what's in here okay what what do you think is going to happen so most of the time people actually make decisions based on heuristic so heuristic is a mental shortcut essentially this is a system one kind of thinking um situations everybody here in this office I'm sure is really busy I mean you don't have the time or the mental capacity to sit down and weigh the pros and cons of every single thing right especially for for a snack by making the healthier food more visible we're actually going to be tapping on one of these herur istics which is convenience or what we call the default option because the healthier food is in the transparent box it's more visible to them and so to them it's like oh this is the first snack I see I'll just take this snack then yeah and another reason why this obstruction nudge works is because if we block or obstruct the view of the uh unhealthy snacks then when they're hungry later the thought of unhealthy food W there no image there's no image there to see just the box right can't visualize it so then you don't like crave it in a sense in the original social experiment conducted by Google candy options in their pantries were moved from transparent containers into opaque jars during the experiment which ran for 7 weeks the proportion of total calories consumed through Candy by employees dropped from 29 to 20% a 9 percentage Point drop I noticed that this sweet and this Savory yes so we have two these two options uh one is to kind of account for individual preferences um in our experiment so basically how the experiment works is that it's going to take place over 4 days on day one maybe we would have both the Savory healthy and unhealthy food in transparent containers so this would give us a baseline measure of people's General snacking Tendencies for Savory Foods and then on day two then we move the unhealthier snack into the opaque box so day one and day two will just be the Savory ones and then day three and day four will be the sweet ones in this social experiment Savory option that's less healthy contains more salt while the sweet option that's less healthy contains more sugar I'm excited to see if our pantry experiment will bear fruit and while we wait for the results of that we have another nudge on the table so it looks like we've got a table full of very delicious looking food what's going on here so today we're going to test the effect of presenting uh certain food at the beginning of the buffet as compared to those they are present behind in particular right here we have all the healthy options presented at the start of the buffet so we're going to try to nudge people into picking the healthy options first and uh hopefully that would sort of influence them to consume more of these as opposed to those at the back of the buet so how does this act as a nudge simply by putting this food here in the concept of anchoring we are usually anchored towards the initial value that's been placed on the table so this is actually done in negotiations right so when we negotiate our salary we often uh state of value at the beginning usually the final amount that people agree on is not far off from uh the initial anle so in the context of this Buffet out here we want to Anchor them towards the first option Serv wow so simply by putting this stuff at the beginning you hope them to ground their choices so they probably eat less of that yeah our brain um processed in such a way that uh we don't like complexity if the buffet spread has got many many other options yes what you want is to show them what you want them to consume in the beginning they're going to come in this way are they rather than that way yes um and so how how will they know that they're going to come in this way the utensils and the plates are placed at the beginning so this in itself is a a form of Notch as well this is beside an anchor point yes correct consumers have to uh pick up the utensils before they actually go on to uh select um the food options will we be able to watch what's going on uh yeah we can watch from sight lines let's do [Music] that we've arranged for a lunchtime Buffet to be served on 2 days with the healthy options at the start of the buffet line on the first day and at the back of the line on the second so there they've gone for the calm heavy approach yeah so I I really don't see the salad being touched very [Music] [Music] much it's been two weeks since we started experimenting with nudges in the workplace we asked office workers to pick healthier snacks in an office pantry and to select healthy options at a work buffet and now it's time to unpack the results in our office Pantry experiment we tried to nudge office workers towards healthier Snacks by using an obstruction nudge we put out a selection of sweet snacks and Sav every On's over 4 days and obstructed the view of the less healthy options on every alternate day meanwhile at the work Buffet we tried to nudge office workers to pick the healthy options first by placing those at the front of the buffet line on day one and then placing it at the back of the line on day two to see if the nudge had an effect what happened in the buffet uh we actually see a nudging effect so there are two ways of looking at it uh first way is the number of items that has been consumed which is the number of servings down here is the notch condition where we have the healthy options presented up front so right here you can see that the slice fruits so we have like 74 portions taken out uh but when we look at the no nutch condition you can see that uh the amount of slice food that's been taken up has been halfed which is a very strong effect so here uh is the pie shot display of the nudge condition the green segment represents the amount of people that ended up with more healthy options on their plate as compared to the unhealthy options the yellow segment is the proportion of people who has even the number of healthy food and unhealthy option on their plate and whereas the red segment represents people who took up more of the the fried food on their plate as compared to the healthy options just pay attention to the green and the red segment when there's no NCH uh people are more generally inclined to take up the unhealthy food while Google did not publish the results of their Buffet nudge our results are consistent with the findings of a bigger study by inad which found that placing fruit and salad options close to the front of a cafeteria resulted in participants eating nearly 200 fewer calories every day so for the office Pantry experiment without the nudge uh people chose quite a lot of the uh unhealthier options but when we introduce the nudge when we put the unhealthy snacks in the opaque box you can see that the number of unhealthy options that people chose drastically [Music] reduced so what can we deduce from these results I think one thing that at least we can uh deduce from the obstruction nudge is that keeping unhealthy food out of sight might actually be effective in discouraging you to uh eat unhealthy food you can actually implement this nudge yourself you can try putting your unhealthy snacks in an opaque box at the back of the cabinet at the back of the fridge basically introducing obstacles making it very difficult for you to access so in the moment when you're like oh I'm so hungry what's there to eat um you know you maybe open the fridge hopefully the first thing you see is like a healthy fruit what is important now here is note that uh this nudging whatever you just did is free all we did is just shift the healthy options up front and we can see a sizable change in number of people who ended up taking more healthy options on their plate so if we apply this to the the whole population of Singapore can end up possibly saving a lot of people the more money they can save from let's just say diabetes medication if people end up with diabetes I've learned that over nearly 300,000 years we've gone from hunting for energy dense meat and Marrow in the wilderness to buying burger patties and bags of chips off Supermarket shelves because these foods are rich in calories and our brains believe they're our best chance of survival in our modern world but it is possible to leave behind our more Primal instincts when it comes to food and the social experiments we've done show that we can make healthier eating decisions while still having the freedom to choose with just the right [Music] nudge