Not all eating habits are made alike. Some routines may even be beneficial, new study says

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Public release date: 30-Jan-2006

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-01/uocp-nae013006.php

Contact: Suzanne Wu

swu@...

University of Chicago Press Journals

Not all eating habits are made alike. Some routines may even be

beneficial, new study says

A new study on eating habits, forthcoming in the March 2006 issue of the

Journal of Consumer Research, reveals that not all eating habits are

made alike. Adwait Khare (University of Houston) and J. Inman

(University of Pittsburgh) identify two ways of characterizing eating

habits, which they termed " carryover habit " and " baseline habit. " Their

findings have important implications for nutritional guidelines and meal

planning.

Carryover habit describes meal decisions affected by previous meals. The

authors found that what we eat at a meal – say, breakfast – is more

influenced by what we ate at the same meal the previous day than by the

other prior meals. Breakfast has the strongest " carryover effect, "

possibly because we have less time to decide what to eat for breakfast

and the most consistent environment for this meal.

Since we tend to eat more " good " nutrients, like calcium, at breakfast

and more " bad " nutrients, like saturated fat, at dinner, this carryover

might actually be beneficial. However, when the authors examined how

much of each nutrient tended to be consumed at each meal, they found

that people with a " baseline habit " consistently varied how much of each

nutrient they ate according to what meal it was.

" Daily meals are associated with different food values, " write the authors.

The authors suggest that instead of providing daily nutritional goals,

we might want to embrace multi-day nutritional goals, taking into

account how one day's meals affect the next day's meals. Also, knowing

that we tend to approach dinner with a different set of habits, can help

us look at nutritional goals with more clarity.

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Adwait Khare and J. Inman. " Habitual Behavior in American Eating

Patterns: The Role of Meal Occasions. " Journal of Consumer Research.

March 2006.

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