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This paper introduces experiential pleasure of food (EPF) as a journey that involves the enduring cognitive and emotional pleasure consumers gain from savoring the multisensory, communal, and cultural meanings of food experiences. Specifically, our paper extends work by Cornil and Chandon (2016a and 2016b) on epicurean eating pleasure (EEP) and identifies and defines three stages (contemplation, connection, and creation) and its determinants as they lead to consumers' food well-being (Block et al., 2011). EPF (vs. EEP) aims to promote enduring (vs. improved) consumer well-being and explores marketing and public policy implications and future research areas that might help achieve food well-being (FWB) (Block et al., 2011). EPF offers a clear path to connect pleasure and EEP with FWB. Specifically, our conceptualization of EPF will serve scholars, public policymakers, and marketers who are interested in understanding enduring healthy eating through the perspective of food as pleasure rather than as a health deterrent.

This study investigated the impact of food claims, food cues, and objective health characteristics on health categorization speed and accuracy, believability of claims and perceptions of health, and taste for food items. One hundred twenty-four young adults were exposed to counterbalanced food item images, which varied by directness of visual food cues, type of food claims (health-related vs. taste-related), and objective healthfulness in a fully crossed design across three different food items. Participants categorized the foods as healthy or unhealthy in a speeded task and evaluated the perception of claim believability and perceptions of health and taste after exposure to images of the food items. Direct visual cues, especially when used with health claims, improved health and taste perception ratings and aided believability of health claims even for objectively unhealthy food products.

Objectives:Text message–based interventions may provide sexual health information to young people through a number of service types, from sending information on a regularly scheduled timeline, to providing an automated menu, to allowing young people to connect directly with health educators. While such service types exist, it is not clear which features young adults feel are most effective at allowing them to engage with sexual health information.Design:This study used a mixed-methods design (survey and focus groups) to assess perceptions of three types of sexual health text message services with young adults, a population particularly at risk of negative sexual health outcomes.Setting:College students from the US Pacific Northwest participated in the project.Method:Participants heard about three sexual health text message services, completed questionnaires and discussed each type. Focus groups were gender-separated.Results:Participants reported that services that allowed them to connect with a health educator would be highly useful, but automated services would be beneficial in bringing new topics to their attention. Participants perceived the purpose of the service types as different and felt each could be a useful resource, depending on the situation. Regardless of service type, participants wanted to personalise their experience. Participants wanted messages tailored to them and options to interact with the systems, from influencing topic selection to message timing.Conclusion:Each of the service types can be useful for young adults. Young adults perceive services that provide the opportunity to tailor information and interact with the system as beneficial.

Negative attitudes toward being overweight or obese are widespread, and these notions perpetuate into conceptions about one's health. Clinically, being overweight is associated with health problems such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and many other illnesses. African American women, who are generally larger in body size, are a particular target for health interventions. However, these women have resisted the "obesity" label, arguing that dominant measures of health are White norms and oppressive. Through the use of in-depth interviews, this study investigates how African American women understand and experience healthfulness, body image, and barriers to each. Findings show that African American women are ambivalent in their acceptance of dominant markers of health and expressed an almost universal disdain for the thin ideal as a marker of "good" health and a positive body image. Moreover, participants articulated a suspicion of formal medical measurements of obesity.

To examine the potential effectiveness of media literacy education in the context of well-established personality factors, a survey of 472 young adults, focused on the issue of alcohol marketing messages, examined how individual differences in personality associate with constructs representing aspects of media literacy. The results showed that need for cognition predicted social expectancies and wishful identification with media portrayals in alcohol advertising only through critical thinking about media sources and media content, which are foci of media literacy education. Need for affect did not associate with increased or diminished levels of critical thinking. Critical thinking about sources and messages affected skepticism, represented by expectancies through wishful identification, consistent with the message interpretation process model. The results support the view that critical thinking about media sources is an important precursor to critical thinking about media messages. The results also suggest that critical thinking about media (i.e., media literacy) reflects more than personality characteristics and can affect wishful identification with role models observed in media, which appears to be a key influence on decision making. This adds support to the view that media literacy education can improve decision making across personality types regarding alcohol use by decreasing the potential influence of alcohol marketing messages.