Curious about eating habits

In two studies conducted by Liselotte Schäfer Elinder's research group, both published in 2020, the school meals in the municipalities of Botkyrka and Uppsala were  improved regarding nutritional content and greenhouse gas emissions. For four weeks, the children ate a diet that was kind – not only to the planet and our bodies – but also to the wallet.

“We have developed a method, ‘OPTIMAT’, with which we can optimise meals. This means taking into account many things at the same time, nutrition of course, but also greenhouse gas emissions and costs. Greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by 30 to 40 per cent without the pupils wasting more food– and this didn't cost more, on the contrary, it was a little cheaper,” she says.

Overall, the pupils were satisfied, although this did not apply to all the children. Liselotte Schäfer Elinder now hopes that more municipalities will test this method.

“Many municipalities have their own targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and all regions in Sweden have targets for improving public health and reducing health inequalities. By optimising public meals for health and the environment, you can achieve several objectives in one go,” she says.

It is up to each municipality and its education administration whether they join the project.

“Emissions from all public meals in the country actually represent a relatively small percentage of total food emissions, but we believe that this can have a strong signal effect,” she says.

Liselotte Schäfer Elinder believes that starting with children's eating habits is the right way to go.

“We believe that the school food we offer our children has a strong educational effect. Studies show that dietary habit track from childhood to adulthood,” she says.

Food preferences can be changed

It is perhaps more difficult to change your eating habits once you are an adult. However, Janina Seubert, who has performed both behavioural and brain imaging studies on adult volunteers, is convinced that it is possible to change food preferences as an adult. We just need to find out more about how our brain works and what the associations between smell and taste are like. In some studies which Janina Seubert and her colleagues have performed, the adult volunteers lay in an MRI camera while they could smell and see pictures of food.

“If you see a food product and smell it at the same time, you get strong brain activity in both visual brain areas and the parts of the brain that are involved with smell. If smell and image fit together, you usually like that smell. But if you can smell fish at the same time as a picture of an ice cream appears, normally you do not like the smell of fish, even if you like fish otherwise,” she says.

Vaguely familiar smell and taste experiences

When we get to look at and smell semi-familiar foods, the brain reacts in a different way than when we look at something that we think is disgusting or super delicious.

“If you are not sure if you recognise the smell, the prefrontal parts of the brain, which are related to decision-making, become superactive. Here we have a chance to change perception, we are more open to cognitive influence. In one experiment, we used ‘vaguely familiar variations’ of familiar food, like lemonade with a little chicken aroma, which produces a ‘somewhat odd lemonade’,” explains Janina Seubert.

“I think you can compare the lemonade with the chicken aroma with something like oat milk, which some people probably also interpret as ‘somewhat odd milk’,” she says.

The fact that the brain starts working like this around food or drink which is neither really familiar nor completely unfamiliar to us, means that there is the potential to help our taste development along the way,” she says.

“If we want to influence how we eat, I think we need to work with vaguely familiar smell and taste experiences,” she says.

In an ongoing study, she is now investigating whether there are circumstances in the environment around the meal that can help drive us in the direction of more desired food preferences.

“Maybe it's a little easier to learn to like blue cheese in a really nice restaurant. Or to learn to like new and more low-calorie food when you're not so hungry,” she says.

Many people, especially young people, have switched to a more plant-based diet.

“We see in the statistics that meat consumption is declining, but far from enough. That is why strong efforts and political decisions are needed. We live in a democracy and have the power to elect decision-makers who make wise decisions. We must develop our eating habits so that they become healthier and more sustainable – and it is urgent. I think most people realise that,” says Liselotte Schäfer Elinder.