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Heuristics
4 Simple Heuristics to Eat More Healthily
Following strict diets can be tough, but simple rules of thumb may help.
Posted January 3, 2022 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Key points
- Healthy eating can be difficult because of complicated diet rules.
- Decision psychology can help by offering simple heuristics, or "rules of thumb," to guide food choices.
- Previous research highlights four food-related heuristics that may improve healthy eating.
Feeling bloated after tucking in over the holidays? Eaten one too many cakes? With the festive period once again behind us, many people are looking for ways to start the New Year well. This often includes swapping seasonal comfort foods for healthier alternatives.
Unfortunately, healthy eating can be challenging. Not only does it require willpower to resist temptations offered by lavish dinners, pastries, and sweets—an additional burden is the cognitive demand that many diets place upon us. This may involve counting calories, looking up glycemic loads or mentally categorising food groups. It’s hardly surprising that many people get lost in complex instructions. Is a high glycemic index always a bad thing? And do sweet potatoes count as vegetables or carbs?
Most people lead extremely busy lives and prefer not to waste their time and energy on making sense of complicated diet rules. Indeed, if you’re tired of Dukan, Atkins and 5:2, why not boost your healthy eating with a little help from the psychology of decision making?
What Are Heuristics?
Decision science offers many insights into the topic of increasing willpower or the strategic design of food and mealtime environments. Additionally, it provides simple decision rules, or heuristics, that enable more efficient choices about healthy foods and portion sizes.
Heuristics refer to "rules of thumb" or mental shortcuts that reduce cognitive load and help to make decisions faster. They allow us to make judgements with limited information, thereby avoiding time-consuming analytical processes or complex reasoning. A common example is the availability heuristic, which is used to make quick judgements about the likelihood of events based on the availability of relevant memories. For instance, people may determine their risk of contracting a disease by recollecting experiences of others falling sick with the same illness. Using the availability heuristic in this way can save time and effort interpreting complex statistical information, while often yielding accurate results.
Food choices are another area, where simple decision rules could go a long way in improving judgements and subsequent outcomes. Previous research and literature has contributed a number of helpful suggestions:
1. Less is more.
This first heuristic aims to address people’s consumption of ultra-processed foods. General consensus exists that ultra-processed foods such as ready-meals, industrialised bread, or reconstituted meat products are less healthy than unprocessed alternatives such as vegetables, fruit, nuts and grains. This is because ultra-processed foods tend to be higher in fat, sugar and salt content.
But how to spot and avoid the processed options? A simple rule is to buy and eat products that contain few ingredients, with some sources suggesting limiting the number to five ingredients or less. A quick check of the ingredients list can therefore tell you whether or not to bag an item. Yes, it’s that simple!
2. Can’t say it? Don’t eat it!
A related food rule focuses specifically on avoiding dodgy additives such as artificial colours or preservatives, which you would never add to home-cooked meals. This rule recommends staying clear of any products that contain ingredients you can’t pronounce. Struggling to say "methylxanthine alkaloid 1,3,7-trimethylpurine-2,6-dione"? This suggests it’s a new chemical that likely doesn’t fill any human nutritional needs. Indeed, the ingredient in question is a weed killer, which shouldn’t feature in our regular diet. Beware of exceptions, though: Some packaging may list chemical names of vitamins. The term "Cyanocobalamin" may sound scary, but it actually refers to Vitamin B12.
3. Get "handy."
This heuristics aims to help with gauging appropriate portion sizes. Consuming larger quantities of food than necessary may result in weight gain over time. However, it can be difficult to judge how much to eat without the use of weighing scales or calorie tables. A way of simplifying portion control is to use the size of your hand as guidance. For example, the British Nutrition Foundation suggests that two handfuls of dried pasta or a potato the size of your fist count as sensible portions.
4. Eat colourfully.
The final food heuristic aims to increase people’s vegetable intake and contribute to a varied diet. It suggests increasing the amount of colour on your dinner plate. Rather than eating an all-beige combination of bread, chips and chicken nuggets, this rule requires you to mix it up with the likes of orange carrots, red tomatoes, green spinach and purple aubergine. Recent research supports this recommendation, with studies confirming that more colourful meals contained healthier ingredients such as fruit and vegetables. Additionally, those meals were typically rated to be more enjoyable than many alternatives that lacked colour.
Make Heuristics Work for You
Decision heuristics for healthy eating have the potential to simplify your diet plans and help you make better food choices faster. The rules presented above are useful examples, but the list is by no means comprehensive.
Indeed, it's possible to create your own heuristics that take into account particular goals, personal habits and environments. If you try to cut down consumption of nasty preservatives, for example, you might decide to opt for items with shorter shelf lives. In this case, a quick glance at the product's use-by date is likely to be just as informative (but much quicker!) than scanning the entire list of ingredients for names of unwanted chemicals. Similarly, if you're looking to reduce your intake of ready-meals, you could adopt a rule to avoid buying any products in plastic boxes.
What do you want to change this year? And how can you simplify the process?
