281: the pros and cons of weight loss surgery. Part three: do incentives work?

Healing Outside The Box

Many of us are familiar with bribes to get us to eat our vegetables when we were kids. It was either "you can have a yummy dessert if you eat your vegetables"... Or "you cannot have a yummy dessert if you don't eat your vegetables".

Is either option a good idea if the goal is to improve our intake of vegetables as adults? Probably not.

Today I look into positive and negative incentives to eat healthier and I cite some research studies that suggest both types of incentives can help if designed correctly.

But first, I discuss a bunch of research articles on the benefits of something called sulfuraphane, found in the cabbages and in broccoli. An article listing the benefits and providing just enough explanation can be found here.

An example of a positive incentive to eat healthy produce is already in play. It is a USDA program (therefore available in all 50 states) and it's called the "healthy incentives program" or HIP. It is hugely successful in Massachusetts, but this program relies on states to initiate it in their own state. This HIP program provides $40-$60 worth of free, mostly organic, produce and nuts to all those who have SNAP or food stamps. This additional funding is on top of the current SNAP benefits and only adds healthy food to the current allotment.

You can read about the program in Massachusetts in this article. I am very familiar with this because I was the one who presented it to my retired Congressman John Tierney. That allowed me to meet Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, who ran with it and developed it into the successful program currently in place.

There is also a lot of discussion and some studies testing whether or not negative incentives work to improve healthy eating habits. An example of a negative incentive would be a tax on soda or saturated fat. A good article with a discussion about the success of a tax on soda and/or saturated fat can be found here.

As always, feel free to contact me on my website, Healing Outside the Box. If you would like assistance with healthy recipe ideas or would like the support of a nutritionist, I have a variety of services I offer that can be found here.