When 'Healthier' Choices Fail to Improve Health: Precommitment to Categorically Healthier Lunch Orders

Recent years have seen a wave of behavioral research regarding food choice and ways to encourage healthier eating among consumers, often accompanied by discussion sections that extrapolate theoretical findings well beyond the experimental setting. Whereas academic researchers are often primarily concerned with demonstrating that a causal relationship can exist, we communicate our results with a non-academic audience hungry for narratives about causal relationships that have meaningfully large effects on their health and well-being. This disconnect between the theoretical implications shown by researchers and the clinical implications desired by the general public is exacerbated by experimental paradigms that fail to reflect the majority of real-world decisions (e.g., forced choice between healthy and unhealthy options) or which measure outcome variables other than those most relevant to clinical outcomes (e.g., rated enjoyment of target options). Even in field studies which have led to healthier choices (e.g., increasing share of fruits and vegetables in a meal) in real world decisions, direct clinical measures such as calorie reductions are often not included. We show that improving the relative healthiness of a meal or choice still may not be enough to achieve clinically significant outcomes, using meal calorie consumption as a more direct indicator of an intervention's health impact. We provide field experimental data from a study designed to show that exogenously restricting the timing of lunch orders-that is, experimentally manipulating whether participants ordered a lunch in the morning or at typical lunch hours-can influence the healthiness of the meals ordered. We tested the effect of such a restriction in two stages, allowing us to determine the effect of advance ordering in both the absence and the presence of basic nutrition labeling. Based on previous findings showing subtle but reliable effects of time delay (Hanks, Just, & Wansink, 2012; Milkman, Rogers, & Bazerman, 2010; Read & van Leeuwen, 1998) and of hunger (Tai & Wansink, 2013) on food ordering behavior, we hypothesized that restricting meal ordering to times when consumers were less likely to be hungry may allow them to "precommit" to healthier choices. In a second stage of the study, we further tested whether advance orders would be healthier in the presence of nutrition information, as such information may be necessary to make healthy decisions. We recruited employees (N = 296) in a c