The use of conventional methods to promote healthy dietary habits is met with limited results on improving the food choices and dietary patterns, and thus researchers and health professionals should exercise added prudence and investigate alternative interventions to achieve results, for example, encouraging healthy eating through pleasure. In this study by Landry et al. (2018), the authors investigated existing healthy food perception and definitions of eating pleasure in a sample of healthy adults from the Canadian province of Quebec. In particular, the authors endeavored to identify the common grounds existing between healthy eating and the definitions of eating pleasure, and any existing differences due to participant’s sex and Body Mass Index (BMI). By gathering data from 12 focus groups (men and women, normal weight to obese, n = 92), the authors discovered that most participants defined pleasure derived from eating to be dependant on the sensory attributes of food and the involved psychosocial circumstances. On the other hand, most participants defined healthy eating through the nutritional attributes of food and through food intake-regulating mechanisms. The majority of main perceptions regarding food were similar across participant groups based on their sex or BMI. The authors conclude that their results demonstrated that in most participants’ points of view, the concept of pleasure derived from food and healthy dietary habits appear to be different, however, a degree of congruence remains, making possible the assimilation of conceptual pleasure derived from food with healthy dietary habit-promoting interventions. [NPID: Eating pleasure, healthy eating, qualitative research, Quebec, adults]
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