Socio-economic groups differ in their material, living, working and social circumstances, which may result in different priorities about their daily-life needs, including the priority to make healthy food choices. Following Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, we hypothesised that socio-economic inequalities in healthy food choices can be explained by differences in the levels of need fulfilment....

INTRODUCTION The increase in obesity and disparities in obesity and related chronic diseases across racial and ethnic and income groups have led researchers to focus on the social and environmental factors that influence dietary intake. The question guiding the current study was whether all communities have equal access to foods that enable individuals to make healthy dietary choices. METHODS...

Objective: Several lab and field experiments have shown that goal priming interventions can be highly effective in promoting healthy food choices. Less is known, however, about the mechanisms by which goal priming affects food choice. This experiment tested the hypothesis that goal priming affects food choices through changes in visual attention. Specifically, it was hypothesized that priming w...

Taking into account how people value the healthiness and tastiness of food at both the behavioral and brain levels may help to better understand and address overweight and obesity-related issues. Here, we investigate whether brain activity in those areas involved in self-control may increase significantly when individuals with a high body-mass index (BMI) focus their attention on the taste rath...

The behavior of others in people's social environment (i.e., descriptive norms), as well as their opinions regarding appropriate actions (i.e., injunctive norms) strongly influence people's decisions and actions. The goal of this study was to extend prior laboratory research on the influence of social norms on food choices, by conducting a field-experiment in an on-campus food court. One of thr...

Few studies have assessed the dietary Practices of people with diabetes during Ramadan (1). A sub study of Ramadan prospective diabetes study (2) which was conducted at the outpatient department of Baqai Institute of Diabetology and endocrinology, Karachi Pakistan in 2009 analyzed the food choices of patients with diabetes during Ramadan. Several irregularities regarding dietary intake and food...

Investigations of the contribution of food costs to socioeconomic inequalities in diet quality may have been limited by the use of estimated (vs. actual) food expenditures, not accounting for where individuals shop, and possible reverse mediation between food expenditures and healthiness of food choices. This study aimed to explore the extent to which food expenditure mediates socioeconomic ine...