Bite the Cucumber: Eat Your Fruits and Vegetables!

"What we know is that people tend to eat less healthy when they are stressed."
"So, if you see a carrot less as something like, 'Ugh, gosh, I have to eat a carrot' and more, 'I get paid to eat a carrot', does that mitigate the effects of stress on healthy eating?"
"Obviously, we had the hypothesis that incentives might buffer the effects of stress and diet, but I didn't think it would be this clear."
"I thought there might be a glimmer of something going on, so when we actually saw the effects and the size of the effects, I was pretty stunned."
Angela Bryan, professor of psychology and neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder

"Where there is most evidence for effectiveness for incentives is in those who tend to be poor, and have mental health problems ... including addiction."
Theresa Marteau, director, Behaviour and Health Research unit, University of Cambridge

Photo by Getty Images

So, is it bribery to 'pay' someone to eat whole foods like fruits and vegetables that are good for them; nutritious and delicious which they would otherwise not include in their daily diet? And if it does qualify as bribery, is that a bad thing? The very word has illicit connotations. Is that a contrivance of sneaky do-goodism? And does it matter? Before even getting to that stage, would it work? That's what researchers at University of Colorado Boulder set out to determine.

And according to their findings published in the Journal of Health Psychology, busy people will respond positively to the notion that someone will pay them to eat healthy food. Their ploy to entice people to eat daily servings of fruit and vegetables if for no other reason than to scoop up a financial reward, appears to have worked handsomely. The study resulted in the conclusion that a financial incentive can impact on eating habits and stress levels.

According to Dr. Bryan, her team began the study for the purpose of determining whether incentivizing healthy behaviours could reduce people's feelings of pressure and stress in their daily lives. The researchers tasked 128 study participants to track their daily stress levels, along with fruit and vegetable consumption for a period of three weeks during which one group was given a dollar for each time they ate a serving of fruit or vegetables and the control group received nothing as compensation.

For days when test subjects reported they felt stressed, those in the group being paid maintained their consumption intake of fruits and vegetables in contrast to whose who received no payment who consumed fewer servings of fruits and vegetables.

In acknowledgement that the researchers based their findings on self-reporting, seen to be subjective and unreliable, they recommended that any additional investigation might build on their findings through the use of "a more objective method of measurement", as well as tracking subjects over a longer term to understand how enduring new eating habits could be.

There is a bit of self-defeating irony both in the study and its outcome. With the impression that if you have to pay someone to eat something that is good for them the food in question must be fairly nasty in taste, when nothing could be further from reality. Not all vegetables are the dreaded broccoli and brussels sprouts; most fresh market vegetables taste quite wonderful, and it's hard to think of any fruit that doesn't make anyone's appetite tingle with anticipation.

Other studies in the past viewing the effectiveness of health-related incentive programs discovered they are most productive when they address "simple, discrete and time-limited" actions such as getting vaccinated or visiting the doctor. When it comes to "complex and entrenched" behaviours such as quality of diet and exercise, as well as smoking, they've proven to be less useful to the purpose underlying the attempted incentive-inducing behaviour.

Finally, in the view of Dr. Marteau of the behaviour and health research unit at Cambridge, whether an incentive program works or whether it doesn't will ultimately depend as much on individual circumstances as it will the nature of the behaviour that has been targeted for alteration.