Social connections and the healthfulness of food choices in an employee population

Douglas E. Levy (), Mark C. Pachucki, A. James O’Malley, Bianca Porneala, Awesta Yaqubi and Anne N. Thorndike
Additional contact information
Douglas E. Levy: Massachusetts General Hospital
Mark C. Pachucki: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
A. James O’Malley: Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth
Bianca Porneala: Massachusetts General Hospital
Awesta Yaqubi: Boston University School of Medicine
Anne N. Thorndike: Harvard Medical School

Nature Human Behaviour, 2021, vol. 5, issue 10, 1349-1357

Abstract: Abstract Unhealthy food choice is an important driver of obesity, but research examining the relationship of food choices and social influence has been limited. We sought to assess associations in the healthfulness of workplace food choices among a large population of diverse employees whose food-related social connections were identified using passively collected data in a validated model. Data were drawn from 3 million encounters where pairs of employees made purchases together in 2015–2016. The healthfulness of food items was defined by ‘traffic light’ labels. Cross-sectional simultaneously autoregressive models revealed that proportions of both healthy and unhealthy items purchased were positively associated between connected employees. Longitudinal generalized estimating equation models also found positive associations between an employee’s current food purchase and the most recent previous food purchase a coworker made together with the employee. These data indicate that workplace interventions to promote healthy eating and reduce obesity should test peer-based strategies.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01103-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:5:y:2021:i:10:d:10.1038_s41562-021-01103-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01103-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().