Research shows experiencing nature helps you make healthier food choices

DALLAS (SMU) – Can exposure to nature drive people to make healthier food choices? A new paper by SMU Cox marketing professor Maria Langlois suggests that it is indeed the case, with research participants selecting healthier foods when experiencing natural settings compared to those in urban environments. 

The findings were published recently in Communications Psychology and further support the need to examine nature’s impact on food choices, especially since 68% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050. The study offers practical insights for consumers, parents, food manufacturers, schools and employers.

For Langlois, the research is personal. As a child and young adult, she often struggled with her weight and became curious about what factors influence food choices. Through her own experience, she realized the complexity of human decision-making and its  susceptibility to internal and external factors.

Her academic journey led her to work with and study under the paper’s coauthor, Pierre Chandon, a food marketing researcher and the Director of the INSEAD-Sorbonne University Behavioural Lab.

The research was conducted with over 3,700 individuals participating in a series of five experiments, one of which involved randomly assigning participants in Paris to either take a 20-minute walk in a park or on city streets. Afterwards, the walkers were offered four healthy and four unhealthy snack options. Those who walked in the park chose and consumed healthier foods than those who walked the city streets. The researchers also found evidence suggesting that even experiencing nature through photographs could lead people to more nutritious food choices. 

“This research finds that being in nature allows us to make healthier decisions for ourselves in the long run, to be a little less myopic in this domain,” said Langlois, an assistant professor of marketing in the Cox School of Business. “By incorporating a control condition in one of our studies, we found that experiencing nature drives people towards healthier food choices—not that urban environments drive unhealthy food choices.” 

“Our findings provide greater support for why urban planning and design professionals should pay attention to underserved areas that often lack access to nature spaces,” she added.

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