Harvey Ells

Talking pictures in working school lunches – Investigating food choice with children and adolescents

With influences on aspects of food choice originating from a number of sources and investigation requiring multidisciplinary considerations, more qualitative methods have proved effective in offering some insight into the changing role of food. These methods are particularly useful when considering food encounters and diet of both children and adolescents, as they can provide more personalised accounts of food use and social interactions than more quantitative alternatives. Pictures have previously been used to assist in food related studies, but with limitations. This paper considers the effectiveness of using pictorial prompts to initiate unstructured interviews with two sample groups of children and adolescents, highlighting an increased potential for their use in future research. Other considerations include the restrictions that are often imposed on the independent researcher in terms of time resources and limited access.

Exploring dimensions of eating behaviour in restaurant settings

Standard procedures for researching satiety often rely on environments more closely aligned to clinical settings rather than those typically encountered in food servicescapes. The Culinary Arts Studio at the University of Brighton provides a more authentic context in which to conduct satiety investigations. A recent collaboration with the University of Sussex used these facilities to explore how appetite control can be enhanced by manipulating expectations of satiety. This poster considers the benefits of using more authentic food consumption spaces and emerging technologies to gain further insights in to eating behaviour in restaurant settings. These benefits include the use of video data to analyze patterns of food choice, social interactions and reactions to menus that may impact on food consumption. Increasing the volume of visual data also necessitates more productive means to code the results of interventions with the development of tablet applications being considered for this purpose.

Satiety expectations in a real-world setting

Information about the likely consequence of consuming a food, present at the time of eating, can enhance responses to nutrient ingestion. For example, the satiating power of a high energy beverage was improved by subtlety manipulating its sensory characteristics to generate stronger expectations of satiety. The present study tested whether labelled satiety information can also enhance responses to nutrient ingestion. To ensure that the labelled messages generated strong satiety expectations this study was run outside of the laboratory in a research restaurant under the guise of consumer testing for a national supermarket’s new brand of breakfast products. Participants came to the restaurant on two mornings to consume a fixed breakfast of porridge plus a yoghurt drink and returned 2 h later for ad libitum hot drinks and snacks. On one test day the participants received a low satiety version of the breakfast (315 kcal) and on the other day a high satiety version (638 kcal). Half of the participants were given no information about breakfasts and half received menus describing the satiating power of each of the breakfast consistent with the actual energy content and sensory characteristics. Appetite ratings and mid-morning intake of snacks were used to assess responses to the breakfasts. Participants consumed significantly less of the snacks after the high satiety breakfast, however, providing information about the satiating power of the breakfasts did not improve this response. In a real-world setting explicit satiety messages did not change actual satiety responses.