Business Insider’s Food Wars, A Subtle Way to Nudge
It all begins with me having trouble sleeping at night, I usually woke up at 2–3 AM then I don’t have any choice except forcing myself to sleep by watching Youtube videos. Because of that reason, I bumped into Business Insider’s unique content: Food Wars. Now it becomes a segment that I always look forward into. The idea of the video is simple: comparing calories, menus, and even ingredients of various fast food that is available in the UK and US. Delivered by polar opposite hosts Harry Kersh as the representative of UK’s fast food and Joe Avella as the ambassador of US’s fast food chain, I think Food Wars is more than just comparing food.
United States of America is facing an obesity problem, it has recorded that 40% of adult citizen of US are obese. The rate of obesity in the USA reached exactly 42.4% in 2020 increasing by 26% since 2008 (1). This raise concerned for the authorities to develop solution of nutrition support programs and and creating more opportunities to maintain healthy weight for people to be physically active. One of the reason why obesity rate in the US is considered high is caused by the consumption of fast food. Around 80% people in the US eat fast food at least once in a month (2), during 2013–2016 around 36.6% of adults eat fast food at given day (3), and during 2017–2018 the percentage of calories from fast food consumed by children and adolescence increased by 14.4% (4). This number is not surprising since the US itself has over 200.000 fast-food business all over the country.
Keeping those preliminary statistics in mind made me think that maybe Food Wars is trying to nudge fast-food consumer in the US (or maybe all around the world) to reduce their fast-food consumption subtly. If we observe from Behavioural Science perspective, the way Food Wars also discloses the ingredients for each menus will help people slowly understand on what they eat. And of course this method in behavioural approach would be named Salience. Then how effective would it be to disclose such information for nudging purpose?
Well, The Behavioural Insights Team UK has proven this method with their experiment of reducing sugar intake in Liverpool, UK (5). BIT team put on experiment by giving a stand out sign of high sugar intake drinks in a store, and the experiment showed a significant decrease of people buying high sugar intake drinks by 7.3%. Chetty, et. al (2009) also had conducted a salience behavioural nudge by putting tax inclusion on price tag in California, it resulted on sales drop. That means people are more prone to change their behaviour regarding the disclosed information. And my hypothesis about Food Wars is this the subtle way Business Insider can contribute to change people’s appetite towards fast-food.
From some episode of Food Wars, I just discovered that US’ fast-food ingredients sometimes contained more chemical than UK’s fast food. Even Joe as the host sometimes had trouble pronouncing the whole chemical ingredients used by the fast-food chains. And there is one chemical that is banned in the UK/EU but being used in US, Yellow 5 or Tartrazine. The chemical is actually a food colouring which is not allowed in the EU because it may cause adverse effect on activity and attention on children. Not just chemical, the portion size and the calories of US’ fast-food usually is bigger and higher than the UK’s.
Just imagine on the differences of ingredients, calories, and portion size that matters on high fast-food consumption in the US, after watching Food Wars everything seems make sense. Yes, it contributes in US’ obesity rate issue. The next question is: will people start to realise and reducing their consumption of fast-food after watching Food Wars?
In my opinion, what Business Insider has done with Food Wars is already a big leap for nudging. However, government and the society themselves need to make a commitment on healthy nutritions. Now people has been informed about what they might consume by a single bite of a burger. To reduce the consumption per day, it’s their choice. Or probably US’ government can start to hire nudging team to do a further intervening experiment. We never know that it’s gonna work twice more effective than just watching Food Wars videos?
