Certain foods are often marketed in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes. Think, for example, of the deep, masculine voice who proclaims “We have the meats!” as the tagline from a popular fast food chain, or advertisements aimed at women that tout the low-calorie appeal of a brand of yogurt.
A new study from researchers at University of Oregon suggests that these gender stereotypes around food may also influence kids and the kinds of foods they choose to eat. Nichole Kelly is the Evergreen associate professor in counseling psychology and human services at University of Oregon, and one of the study’s authors. She joins us to talk about the findings and how placing value judgments on certain foods may affect future eating behaviors.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with new research out of the University of Oregon. Researchers found that gender stereotypes around food - as in, “meat is for men and salads are for women” - may influence the choices that kids make. The study also found that both boys and girls who are particularly sensitive to being judged by others, were less likely to eat chips or cookies. Nichole Kelly is the Evergreen associate professor in counseling psychology and human services at the University of Oregon. She joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Nichole Kelly: Thank you for having me.
Miller: What were you interested in learning in this particular study?
Kelly: It’s an interesting story. Actually, we did not start by asking research questions related to things like sensitivity to judgment and gender stereotypes and food. The study you’re mentioning is part of a larger study where we were actually originally interested in seeing whether physical activity could influence kids’ cognitive functions and then their eating behaviors.
In this study, we recruited eight to 10-year-old kids living in Oregon and brought them into our research space, and we had them walking on a treadmill for about 20 minutes at a moderate intensity. We expected, and we did find, improvements in their cognitive functions immediately after walking on a treadmill, specifically in their behavioral inhibition. This is the cognitive function that’s really important for self-regulation of behavior. We suspected that those improvements in self-regulation would lead to improvements in kids’ eating behaviors - essentially that they’d be able to self-regulate around these things like chips and cookies. And we didn’t find that, actually. There were no changes in kids’ eating.
So we were sitting around as a team trying to make sense of this. Well, why didn’t we…and what else could be relevant? And one of my graduate students at the time, who has since graduated, Claire Guidinger, said, “Remember that measure of social desirability bias? I think that could be really interesting. Let’s take a look and see if that idea is actually more related to kids eating.” And it was.
Miller: Well, what is “social desirability bias?” That seems like the kind of a phrase that psychologists throw around when they’re talking to each other and everybody understands it, but the rest of us don’t.
Kelly: Yes, thanks for asking. It is a phenomenon in psychology and it’s this basic idea that when people, kids and adults - everybody really - when we have a sense that we’re being observed and being evaluated, that we might change our behavior to be more socially acceptable. And there’s a lot of individual variability in this. Some people might change their behavior quite a bit. Some, not at all. And the way we measure this in kids is, we have a survey that includes several items that are very normal child behaviors. So things that all kids really do.
One example is: “I always listen to what my parents tell me to do.” And of course, no kid always listens to what their parents ask them to do. So if a kid responds yes to that question: “I always do what my parents tell me to do,” they’re thought to have high social desirability bias, meaning they are responding to the survey in a way that is most likely to be socially acceptable, or most likely to avoid negative judgment from people and most likely to obtain more positive judgments..
Miller: …or they’re just the least adept at lying, out of the kids that you’re surveying.
Kelly: Maybe. That’s a possibility too. But there are several other items that get at different dimensions of socially desirable behavior. One of the other questions, for example, is: “I’m never upset with my friends.” And of course, that’s just not the human experience, right? So, it’s not inaccurate to say that it’s a form of lying, although that feels harsh to say with these kids. Some, I think, are aware and others are not, but it is a way of responding differently that is most likely to be socially favorable.
Miller: In other words, you’re using a questionnaire, I don’t mean sneaky in a pejorative way, but in a roundabout way, to figure out which kids are more likely to be really focused on how other people are perceiving them, how other people are judging them, and they don’t really know what the answers are really getting at. But you have a method there.
Kelly: Absolutely, yes. It is a sneaky way of doing it and we actually can do this with adults as well. They respond in a similar way. We can be sneaky about this and get a sense of whether they are, if you will, under-reporting their experience
Miller: I’m curious - if this doesn’t ruin trade secrets and ruin psychological experiments till the end of time, how do you figure this out in adults without us knowing?
Kelly: Some of this information I’m not allowed to say out loud, on the air, because it is protected information that, as a psychologist, we have access to in administering. But they’re similar items. It’s similar, just day-to-day experiences that people have.
I think there’s one related to never throwing out junk mail, or I look at every single piece of junk mail I get in my mailbox, just things that the overwhelming majority of people are doing and of course, no one says yes to all of these items. But there is a lot of variability, and kids who are just willing to be really frank, like, “Yes, of course, I have these experiences,” and others who are really likely just monitoring themselves a lot more closely.
Miller: OK, I’ve been lingering on this because I found it fascinating. But let’s go on. This was the first thing you did just to put the different subjects - these kids - into different categories. But the heart of the study then followed. So what options did you give them?
Kelly: Options for what, exactly, for eating or for…?
Miller: Exactly. In terms of the food choices they had and the extent to which they are actually being monitored as well.
Kelly: Yes, great question. So the kids start their day with us, actually, early in the morning. They’re asked to not even eat breakfast before they come in to our research space and then we give everyone…because these are eight to 10 year olds, we can have a pretty good estimate of what the caloric needs of kids are around that age. We give everyone a pretty standard breakfast so that everyone is starting in basically the same level of hunger and satiety before they go into the big lunch meal that we’re talking about now.
Then we do other things with them for a couple hours. And then when it’s lunchtime, we roll out this really big array of food that is about 5,000 calories worth of food. This is a meal we have used in lots of other studies over the years, although it is a little smaller because these are younger kids. Sometimes they’re up to 10,000 calories, but they can come in and they could, if they wanted, make themselves a sandwich with meat and cheese and vegetables, they could also have chicken nuggets. There are chips, pretzels, cookies, crackers, candies of different kinds, and four different types of drinks. It’s a really varied meal in terms of macronutrients. So there’s a good proportion of fats and carbs and proteins, and they are foods that in past research have been shown to be liked by kids, generally speaking.
And then your question about, to what extent they’re being observed during this eating? In the study itself, we actually walk kids to a private room and we tell them to just eat until they’re no longer hungry and let us know when they’re done and then we leave the room. So there is a hint of privacy in eating. But I think that, generally speaking, kids know that when it comes to being in a research study, they’re very well aware from the initial consent process that everything they’re doing for us is data collection. And it’s part of the information we’re gathering from them.
And in reality what we’re doing is, we’re really closely measuring the foods before they eat and then right after they’re done eating, which allows us to get really precise about the total calories they’re eating, the macronutrients, micronutrients and so forth.
Miller: When they make their choices, when they make their plates before they go to their private room, are they around other kids as well? Or is it, to the extent that they are aware of people observing them, just the adults who would be aware of what they’re eating?
Kelly: Actually, the buffet is in a room and they get to sit in front of that buffet and choose from that the entire time they’re sitting there, so they don’t have to prepare a plate and leave. They can just eat as they’d like while they’re sitting there and there is no one else around. Their parent is usually in a waiting room. There are no other kids, we’re doing the study just with these kids.
And then we do check with them once they say they’re done. We do say, “OK, did you take anything with you?” It’s not uncommon for them to stick a Starburst in their pocket, for example, so we just want to consider that when we calculate what they’re eating. So I think they have a sense, but we definitely do not say directly that we are measuring their eating behavior.
Miller: Let’s turn to the gender-based finding here. What did you find among boys who had the high sensitivity to judgment, the high social desirability bias?
Kelly: We found that they ate significantly fewer calories from fruits and vegetables. And this was a finding that was not significant in girls. There was no link between social desirability bias and fruit and vegetable consumption in the girls.
Miller: How do you explain this?
Kelly: This is the really, I think, fun and fascinating part for us. When we sat down to just talk about our team, why did we find these things? I think it forced us to start looking into the literature on the relationship - how boys relate to fruits and vegetables. And there is not a lot of research on this. In general, we know that boys and men, in most studies across the lifespan, are eating less fruits and vegetables. And we know that from the research.
Then we found one study with preschool age kids that found that among boys, they implicitly - this is without their conscious awareness - link fruits and vegetables to girls more quickly. So basically, this idea that these are girl foods, and they link meat more quickly to being to boys. So this is an idea of having a boy food here. And we also found a couple of accounts of kids, actually this is so sad, being bullied for bringing fruits and vegetables, salads, things like that to lunch. And that there was an underlying fear that this could happen that was more prominent in boys, for these experiences.
So we just started to wonder if what was happening here was actually that boys were eating less fruits and vegetables because of some of these fears. This idea that “if I eat these things maybe they’ll think I’m a girl,” and in our culture that’s a negative evaluation. And some fear that’s pretty direct from these other qualitative studies of these examples of being bullied, if they have this idea that it’s a girl thing to eat these fruits and vegetables, that I might be negatively evaluated for that, and for these other general reasons, then I’m going to eat less of them in this setting. That’s our preliminary explanation for what’s happening. But a lot more research is needed more directly into the link between gender stereotypes and eating behaviors.
Miller: What do you see as the marketing aspect of this, and how much do you think the finding that you and your colleagues arrived at is tied to advertising?
Kelly: I do think it is one of many contributing factors. Eating behaviors are insanely complex. There are a lot of things that influence why we eat, what we eat, and how much, but media is a prominent consideration here. And as soon as I started thinking about the results of the study, I was recalling all the movies I’ve seen where grown men are made fun of by their friends when they order a salad at whatever restaurant they’re at. And I started thinking about a lot of commercials where certain foods are really advertised as quite literally masculine foods: meat, large portions of meat.
We see some evidence of this in the research too, where certain eating qualities, like eating large amounts of food, are considered more masculine eating experiences, and smaller portions of food are more feminine. And so I do think what we see in the media contributes to the development of these types of beliefs.
Miller: You did say earlier that there is a fair amount of literature at this point showing that boys and men, I think you said, eat fewer fruits and vegetables in general than women do. Is that a finding that is specific to US culture or is that global?
Kelly: That’s a great question. I don’t know. All the studies that I’m referencing at this point…most of the studies in this area have been conducted either in the United States or in Australia, but the overwhelming majority that I’m referencing are in the US. So that’s a great question. I could certainly see there being variations in different places.
Miller: Let’s turn to another finding. And this is not gendered the way the boys and fruits and vegetables are. This was about kids’ selections of snack foods or cookies or candy. What did you find?
Kelly: In the full sample - so in all the kids, boys and girls - we found that kids with higher social desirability bias ate less snack food. These were the chips, cookies and candies.
Miller: And how did you explain that?
Kelly: We suspect this has something to do with pretty well-known values attributed to certain foods, particularly snack foods or the stereotypes these foods have, we quite literally call them “junk foods.”
There are several studies confirming that kids, even really young, they’re very well aware of what foods are considered good and bad foods. And if kids are aware of the potential for being evaluated and judged, and they want to avoid that, it makes sense to me that they might cut back or eat less of the foods that we attribute these negative values to. Because they may assume that we would attribute those same qualities to them. If I don’t want to be seen as bad, then I’m going to eat less of these “bad” foods.
Miller: In the press release about the study, you said that this finding could actually be evidence, or could lead to disordered eating in the future. Why is it potentially worrisome that some kids were less likely to eat junk foods? I mean, that does seem like a good thing.
Kelly: My concern is that they’re eating less of these foods out of fear of judgment, essentially. What we see in the disordered eating literature is, essentially, as soon as we tell somebody that a food is bad, off limits, we shouldn’t eat it, or we should eat a lot less of it, that food instantaneously becomes more rewarding and enticing. We see this in brain imaging studies, for example, in others as well. And what happens is - this is in kids and adults - we see this phenomenon. As soon as we restrict ourselves out of fear of judgment or because someone tells us to or because we’ve decided ourselves that we should be eating less of these, and that food becomes more rewarding and enticing, often people are unable to maintain that intentional restriction of that food.
And when those foods or similar foods become available in the future, people end up overeating or even losing control over their eating, which is called binge eating. And it’s a specific type of disordered eating behavior. And then, people end up after that, feeling a lot of negative emotions around that experience because it was a food they had decided was a bad food or off limits. So there’s a lot of shame and guilt and then they can, because of those feelings, attempt to intentionally restrict again.
You can see how this cycle perpetuates itself. So it just worries me that kids are making these decisions out of fear of judgment, rather than because it makes them not feel good after they eat too much of it, or because they’ve decided they’d rather eat something else that is more nutritious for them, for example.
Miller: So what do you suggest parents do? And I say this selfishly, as somebody who reckons with or wrestles with these questions all the time. If you do want kids to learn to make smart choices about food, that a lot of it is not good for them and even without the added weight of judgment, these foods, they’re engineered to be delicious and instantly pleasure-giving, how do you suggest that parents teach kids sustainable ways to make good decisions about food?
Kelly: I’m a parent too, so I can appreciate that this is harder to do than what I’m about to say. But you’re right, that we can always be making different choices about what we eat, and choosing more nutritious options. I think with kids in particular, the reality is that often the environment is actually a much bigger predictor of what they ultimately eat than what we as parents say to them or suggest to them. And so, that means keeping the environment as much as you’re able to with the resources you have, making it easier for kids to choose certain foods than others.
So, rather than having to have a conversation about not eating another Oreo or another cookie, for example, deciding to simply not have them in the house so you don’t have to have that conversation. So you don’t have to end up, maybe by accident, demonizing cookies, for example. So keeping your environment in a place that makes it easier for the entire family, not just any certain child, to make better decisions.
I do think, and you’re right that people have a bit of a reaction every time I say, it is really important that we not ascribe value judgments to foods of any kind. Because even if you keep your home environment full of fruits and veggies, for example, they are still going to be invited to birthday parties and celebrations at schools and other places where they are being observed. There are people around watching them, and we want to avoid creating these negative relationships with foods.
So removing these value judgments from our language, I think, can go a long way. Not calling certain foods bad or junk, but rather treating them as all foods and role-modeling that, allowing your child to see you eat a cookie without a conversation about what’s wrong with that cookie or that you’re gonna have to do something in response now that you’ve eaten that cookie. Because while we prefer people to eat fruits and vegetables for things like chronic disease reduction, the reality is that, in moderation, all of these foods can be a part of a nutritious diet.
Miller: I’m gonna go home and have my kids watch me eat cookies right now.
Kelly: Good call.
Miller: Just briefly, I’m just curious how you thought about class in this study, and food deserts, and even for example, how you can control for previous access to or familiarity with healthy foods?
Kelly: That’s a great question. We considered things like income in our statistical models and in this particular sample, it wasn’t relevant to what kids ate, but that’s certainly not true on the larger scale of eating behavior decisions in this country. And I’m glad you brought this up because I actually think it’s really relevant to the idea that I just mentioned about a lot of the foods that we are demonizing, if you will, tend to be the foods that are lower cost and more available in these food deserts. Foods that are available in a gas station, for example.
So when we’re demonizing or ascribing these negative values to these foods, in some cases, these are the foods that some families have access to. And so now we’ve created this entire value judgment system around some people’s daily food intake which is not helpful, makes people feel bad, for example. So I think it is just more fuel for the argument to back away from these judgments because it doesn’t feel good and it’s not helpful in promoting healthier eating in people with different resources.
Miller: Nichole Kelly, thanks very much.
Kelly: Thank you.
Miller: Nichole Kelly is the Evergreen associate professor in counseling psychology and human services at the University of Oregon.
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