For most people, hearing about the benefits of eating healthy food is a more effective push to change their behavior than hearing why they shouldn’t be eating junk, a new study claims.
The review found that negative messages — like “Eat healthy foods or lose years off your life!” — are effective for some audiences, particularly experts like physicians or nutritionists who are already knowledgeable in the field. However, positive messages pertaining to what someone should be eating and why it is good for them — such as “By eating healthfully, people can gain positive body image or energy” — tend to work better for a general audience that is less knowledgeable about nutrition.
“If you’re a parent, it’s better to focus on the benefits of broccoli and not the harms of hamburgers,” said Cornell marketing and nutritional science professor Bryan Wansink, who co-authored the report with University of Vermont nutrition and dietetics professor Lizzy Pope, in a release announcing the study.
Extending the research into the area of anti-smoking campaigns, the report argues that a positive message, like “If you quit smoking using this help line, you can save almost $2,000 a year,” would likely be more motivating to its audience than the negative message “Smoking kills you” that is more commonly used.
Recent research on education has also come to a similar conclusion. A 2014 study from the American Psychological Association reported that students who felt threatened by their teachers’ fear-based appeals performed worse on tests because the scare tactics made the students less motivated to succeed.
The Cornell study seems to indicate a shift away from the more attention-grabbing public health campaigns of recent years, such as New York’s “Don’t Drink Yourself Fat” anti-soda campaign and France’s “Smoking Means Being a Slave to Tobacco” anti-smoking ads.
Still, there are caveats. The study’s authors advise public health officials to focus their message on its intended audience, so depending the particular characteristics of that particular audience -- such as how detail-oriented or risk-averse it is --a negative public health campaign could still be effective. For example, the provocative "Tips from Former Smokers" ad campaign from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was credited with helping about 100,000 people permanently quit smoking in 2013.
The report was published earlier this year in the Nutrition Reviews journal and will also be presented at the Society of Nutrition Education and Behavior annual conference in Pittsburgh in July. The research was partially funded by the Produce for Better Health Foundation, a consumer education nonprofit.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness training helped participants in a 2011 Drug and Alcohol Dependence study to stay off cigarettes. That study included 88 people who smoked 20 cigarettes daily, on average, who were split up into two groups: One received four weeks of mindfulness training, while the other group went through four weeks of an American Lung Association stop-smoking program. The researchers found that more of those who went through the mindfulness training smoked fewer cigarettes -- and stayed off them -- than those who went through the other stop-smoking program. The mindfulness training included realizing when you're facing a craving, accepting it, thinking about what's happening and then taking note of the sensation (whether it's tightness or pressure), Psychology Today reported.
Weight Lifting
Jogging and bicycling aren't the only exercises that could help you kick the smoking habit -- Shape magazine reported that weightlifting could help, too. The research, published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research, showed that doing two hour-long weightlifting sessions for 12 weeks plus undergoing treatment to quit smoking was linked with greater success in quitting smoking, compared with just undergoing the stop-smoking treatment.
Eat Produce
Eating lots of fruits and veggies could help smokers maintain a tobacco-free lifestyle, according to research from the University of Buffalo. The study, published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, included 1,000 smokers ages 25 and older. The researchers had the participants answer surveys about their smoking habits and their fruit and vegetable intake. Then, they followed up with them 14 months later and asked them if they used tobacco over the past month. The researchers found that there was a relationship between the amount of fruits and vegetables the study participants ate, and the likelihood that they quit -- and stayed off -- tobacco. In fact, people who ate the most produce in the study were three times more likely to report that they'd been tobacco free in the previous month. The researchers also found a link between increased produce consumption and taking longer in the day to have the first cigarette, smoking fewer cigarettes, and decreased dependence on nicotine (based on test results).
Acupuncture And Hypnosis
A review of studies suggests there is evidence that acupuncture and hypnosis can work to help quit smoking, Reuters reported. Researchers, who published their findings in the American Journal of Medicine, said that other options -- like medications and counseling -- should be tried first, but that hypnosis and acupuncture could help if those options don't work, or if people don't want to go on medications, according to Reuters.
Text Messages
Who knew your phone could be used to help you quit smoking? A recent study published in the journal The Lancet showed that smokers who enrolled in a program called "txt2stop" -- where they received encouraging text messages to quit smoking -- were twice as likely to kick the habit after six months, compared with smokers who didn't get any encouraging messages. In the study, conducted by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, one group was able to text words like "lapse" and "crave" to a phone number, and received an encouraging text message in return, CNET reported. The other group of people, however, only got one text message every two weeks, and that message just thanked them for being part of the study.
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