The Effectiveness of “Emolabeling” to Promote Healthy Food Choices in Children Preschool Through 5th Grade

Abstract

Obesity has become a growing global concern. Evidence indicates that ecological factors are most predictive of obesity among children, and that a new strategy, referred to as emolabeling, may effectively address ecological factors, although the extent to which it can influence food choice is not yet known, but tested here. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that children aged 3 to 11 years will use emolabels, or emotional correlates of health (i.e. healthy-happy, unhealthy-sad), to make healthy food choices. A cross-sectional design was used with two phases. In Phase 1, children were taught how to use emolabels with a "faces of health" lesson. In Phase 2, children made choices between containers that were laid out on a large table in pairs and varied by taste (tastes good, no information), social norms (popular, not popular), branding (image of a minion, no image), or preference (told what food was in each container). A control pair was labeled with only emoticons. The order and presentation of the containers were counterbalanced for each variation. Results showed that a significant proportion of children in the pre-literacy and the early literacy grades used emoticons to specifically make healthy food choices in each variation (p < .05 for all tests), except when children were told what foods were in the containers. In all, emolabeling effectively influenced food choices for healthy foods among children aged 3 to 11 years, more so than labeling for taste, social norms, and branding, but not preference.

Emolabeling Effectively Reduces the Influence of Ambiguous Labeling on Food Packages Among Grocery Store Shoppers

“…This strategy ensured that a consistent sampling procedure was employed throughout the day to manage the observational period. Shoppers were asked to complete a brief survey to “determine how to serve them better.” The response rate for requests to participate was 77% (85 out of 111 requests), which is a satisfactory rate for selecting representative samples ( Baruch, 1999 ; Privitera, 2014 ).…”

“…Such an image-based strategy is a potentially practical strategy to implement. Emolabeling is effective at communicating health across all health literacy levels, even among those with low/no literacy ( Privitera et al, 2013 , 2014 ); and it uses simple expressions of emotion (using emoticons) that are recognized universally ( Darwin, 1979 ) to communicate correlates of health (happy = healthy, sad = not healthy). Emolabeling can therefore enhance the informativeness of nutrition information, as demonstrated in this study, and appears to be a dynamic strategy with the potential for widespread application across multiple ecological contexts.…”

“…Using emolabeling, emoticons are used to represent emotional correlates of health (happy = healthy; sad = not healthy). It is a potentially robust labeling strategy in that it uses emoticon images to simplify nutrition labeling and has been shown to effectively improve health knowledge and healthy food choices even among children who cannot read and write ( Privitera et al, 2013 ; Privitera, Phillips, Misenheimer, & Paque, 2014 ), and thus should effectively improve health knowledge among consumers at all health literacy levels. Also, emolabels are easy-to-recognize images that intuitively correlate with health and can bring greater attention to health information ( Privitera et al, 2014 ).…”

“…It is a potentially robust labeling strategy in that it uses emoticon images to simplify nutrition labeling and has been shown to effectively improve health knowledge and healthy food choices even among children who cannot read and write ( Privitera et al, 2013 ; Privitera, Phillips, Misenheimer, & Paque, 2014 ), and thus should effectively improve health knowledge among consumers at all health literacy levels. Also, emolabels are easy-to-recognize images that intuitively correlate with health and can bring greater attention to health information ( Privitera et al, 2014 ). Therefore, we tested the utility of emolabeling on nutrition labels by recording the healthfulness ratings of consumers for a low-calorie (LC) and high-calorie (HC) food with/without emolabels present, and with ambiguous labels that implied that a food was either healthy or unhealthy.…”

Emolabeling increases healthy food choices among grade school children in a structured grocery aisle setting

“…Evidence indicates that this labeling strategy can improve knowledge about the healthfulness of foods among children (Privitera et al, 2013) and adults (Privitera, Brown, & Gillespie, 2015). A more recent study showed that adding emolabels onto plain food containers could further promote healthy food choices among 5 to 11 year old children (Privitera, Phillips, Misenheimer, & Paque, 2014).…”