Healthy Eating Habits and Game Theory
Currently in the United States, obesity is running rampant among all age classes throughout the country and can be seen especially in young children and adolescents. While there are many different explanations for this spreading medical condition, one major cause stems from people’s general eating habits. From a young age, children become accustomed to eating a variety of unhealthy foods such as hot dogs, pizza, or chicken fingers. As they grow older, some never move on from these old eating habits and just continue eating even more of these unhealthy items. Others turn to a different variety of fats and sugars and refuse to eat the proper foods, like vegetables and whole grains, which would constitute a healthy diet. In order to understand why people make the eating choices they do, it is important to consider the benefits and detriments of eating healthy foods versus unhealthy ones. As such, one’s eating habits can be modeled through a game.
A single person’s game would be formed with the columns representing whether or not something tastes good and the rows representing whether something is unhealthy or not. Within each box in the matrix, the left amount would be the “physical impact” and the right amount would be the “mental impact”. The physical impact represents how beneficial a food’s nutrients are to the body itself whereas the mental impact describes the happiness a person gets from the taste of the food. Visually, the model would look like this with the size of the letter being the relative payoff:
Although there are exceptions to the above form and different personal preferences which would make for an incredibly large matrix, a general interpretation can be taken from each box in this 2 by 2 matrix. If something is healthy but also tastes good, it will most likely be the case that the food is neither exceptionally healthy nor exceptionally tasty. The outcome of these two choices will be a moderate benefit to both the physical and mental aspects of a person as depicted in the top left box. On the opposite spectrum in the bottom right box, when something is both unhealthy and unappetizing, it will not have any appeal to a person. The outcomes are both negative in this situation, and it will be the case that people avoid basically 100% of the time. The two other cases are probably the most common among foods and the reason why people choose to eat what they do. If something is really unhealthy yet is still desired, it must mean that it has an appealing taste. Because the food tastes so good, the person is mentally satisfied with himself/herself; however, the poor nutrition of the food is physically destructive to the person’s body giving the payoff shown in the bottom left corner. Moving to the final corner, if something is incredibly healthy, chances are that it will not taste as good as an unhealthy treat. Still it has a tremendous benefit to the physical makeup of people even if they don’t get the immediate satisfaction they would from a tasty item.
The problem with this matrix is that it does not represent a clear-cut, simple game. When looking at the model closely, it is evident that the top left corner is a pure Nash equilibrium. This outcome is obviously the best of both worlds and would most likely result in a person who is both physically fit and mentally satisfied. Then the question must be asked why a person would want to eat anything else. The article “Nutrition Fun Through Game Teory” speaks about how difficult emotions and extreme stress may lure people into the bottom left box on occasion. Similarly people who are training for athletic events or who are just particularly health conscious will tend to venture to the upper right box. This, however, still does not explain why people are obese or just constantly stick to their poor eating habits. To depict the reason for this, a different game can be imagined which is most likely what goes through some people’s minds as they contemplate what kind of foods they want to eat:
It is interesting to first look at this model in a manner in which we assume no knowledge of the importance of eating healthy. In this game, the physical benefit one gets from eating any kind of food is considered to have the same payoff in each situation which is neither positive nor negative. Because of this, the physical impact of eating can be completely disregarded when analyzing the different outcomes. Also when something does not taste good, the person views the mental payoff as equal to the amount he/she would the physical payoff. These two conditions basically void the right column of the game, making it only necessary to look at the left column. This means that in this game, tasting good is a “dominant strategy” (although it is not necessarily the most beneficial to the person). As physical benefit has already been ignored, the likely outcome of the game appears to be the bottom left corner in which a person eats something which tastes good and is unhealthy as this will generate the most amount of mental satisfaction.
From this new game, it is easy to see why a person would choose to eat something unhealthy that tastes good over something that is both healthy and tastes good. In an obese person’s envisioned game, this outcome is best and makes the most sense. By taking the physical aspect out of the game, it becomes very one-sided and an easy choice for a person to eat unhealthy food. Obesity thus is shown to be a mental issue. People with obesity value the joy they get from eating tasty food substantially higher than the physical strength that comes from eating healthy. Similarly, people who may not suffer from obesity but still indulge in poor eating that can lead to other health problems see the game the same way. They are so stuck on the fact that they cannot eat anything out of their comfort range that they fail to see the physical harm they are doing to themselves. It is also easy to see why children can fall into this trap. Growing up, if a child is not exposed to a wide range of foods he/she can get stuck in a comfort zone which can be incredibly difficult to break free from as time goes on. Also children who are not made aware of the physical benefit from eating right will only be able to envision the second game above as they have no value to place on the physical aspect of the game. In order to help fix the problem of poor eating habits, actions must be taken to convert the second game above back into the first game in people’s minds as they contemplate their meal choices.
One way to help convert the one-sided game is through advertising as described in the article. An unhealthy item which is also tasty and appealing to many is a burger. However, when one restaurant started advertising healthy turkey burgers, people still went to eat them. Turkey is more healthy then the fatty beef which composes a burger, yet because the people were still getting a “burger”, they had no problem making the switch from one to the other. This corresponds with a shift from the bottom left corner in the second game to the top left in the first, which is the optimal outcome for most people. This is just one example which bridges the two games. Therefore, we can see that by studying game theory, we can help find solutions to reduce poor eating throughout the country.
Source:
http://www.examiner.com/article/nutrition-fun-through-game-theory