Effectiveness of nudging as a way to enhance healthy food choice : a littérature review

Details

Supervisors

Van den Broucke, Stephan ; Broers, Valérie

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques

Abstract

There is a growing need to work on enhancing people’s diet and therefore on reducing health related risks. The BMI (Body Mass Index) is a good way of knowing main population’s health. According to The World Health Organization, about thirty to eighty percent of the European’s population and twenty percent of children are overweight. When you know that child obesity leads to adult obesity with an average of sixty percent, and that non-chronic diseases partially caused by obesity is the main cause of deaths in the High income countries but becomes more and more prominent in the low and middle income countries, we understand the need for public policies to work on this area. There are several different exciting interventions aimed to change people’s behavior including individuals interventions, population based interventions and environmental interventions. Nudging, a behavioral economic intervention, can be classified in the last category. Thaler and Sunstein, the authors that made this intervention worldwide define nudge as the gentle way to influence an individual’s behavior, define it. Despite some critical comments, Nudging seems to be an efficient way to enhance a selected behavior while keeping people’s own will. Applied to the nutrition problematic, nudges seems to have mixed effects but when taking nudges types independently, some significant results are found. For example, convenience as well as nutrition labeling seem to have the biggest effect. Nudging should therefore be included in the health public policies to further assess its efficacy. There are some countries like the United States or England that are using behavioral economics for some population based intervention but the number is limited. Since Belgium has a high level of overweight individuals, nudging seems to a good available answer for current concerns.