Consuming media, consuming food?: Reactivity to palatable food cues in television content

Media use – in particular TV viewing – has shown to be an important factor in the development of obesity, which is one of the most urgent and challenging health issues in today’s society. One often proposed reason for the relationship between TV viewing and obesity is that, while watching TV, people are continually exposed to palatable (i.e., tasty, yet often unhealthy) food, for example in TV commercials and cooking shows, which may trigger food intake even in the absence of physical hunger. However, so far, strong evidence for a causal effect of exposure to food cues in TV content on food intake in adults has been lacking. The current dissertation therefore aims to investigate to what extent, for whom, and through what processes exposure to palatable food cues embedded in TV content may increase unhealthy food choices and food intake. Results show that watching TV content containing palatable food cues may produce psychological reactivity, but that this reactivity likely depends on a range of factors. Based on empirical investigation of two psychological processes (i.e., hedonic eating goal accessibility and visual attention), two of such influential factors are individual differences in eating restraint and perceived self-regulatory success, and (likely) the type of TV content. No evidence was found that heightened psychological reactivity to food on TV subsequently resulted in behavioral reactivity (i.e., unhealthy food choices or increased food intake). Taken together, findings from the research presented in this dissertation suggest that the influence of palatable food cues in TV content on immediate food intake is less evident than is often thought.