Machine Methods for Proper Nutrition

Perhaps inspired by public interest in robotics, organizations marketing healthy eating are comparing the body to a machine. Examples given by the Stanford University and University of Amsterdam researchers who studied the effectiveness of this approach include “power the human machine” from Centrum. Calorie count and nutrition label initiatives assume we process information like a machine.
     The tactic can be turned around to justify less healthy indulgences, such as in the tagline, “Working like a machine? Have a Kit Kat.” So over all, to what degree do these body-as-a-machine appeals foster healthy eating?
     In their studies, researchers portrayed the human body as a machine in one of three ways: 

• The digestive system was illustrated as a set of mechanical devices 
• A picture of a human face included machine-like features 
• A virtual telepresence robot, looking and moving like people’s commonly held image of a robotic body, was shown

     Pairing these depictions with prompts to eat healthy made those prompts noticeably more effective. Often. At other times, though, it backfired. Those times were when the recipients lacked self-efficacy regarding healthy eating. They doubted their ability to monitor food intake as a machine would. The human-as-a-machine representations ended up nudging these individuals toward unhealthy food consumption as a way to ease their decidedly nonmechanical feelings of failure. A number of studies link a lack of healthy eating self-efficacy to obesity. It appears, then, that the machine representation tactic was worse than useless. It aggravated an existing problem.
     This finding fits with older research, from University of Miami and University of San Diego, which concluded that planning a program of healthy nutrition is less likely to help you achieve self-control in eating when you feel bad about your weight to start with. If a heartless machine has requisite mechanical capabilities, it can be programmed with plans to carry out a task regardless of how successful this machine has been at that task in the past. But even if the capabilities are there, a human-as-a-machine will be disheartened by perceptions of past failures.
     The Stanford/Amsterdam team did develop a simple way to ease the backfire, at least for the duration of their experiment: Included directly below the depiction of the human-as-machine was the text, “You CAN choose your food today with your head (not your heart).” Repeated reassurance of this sort might be expected to maintain the healthy eating effect of a machine representation.

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