Unhealthy diets, obesity and time discounting: a systematic literature review and network analysis.

ABSTRACT: There is an increasing policy commitment to address the avoidable burdens of unhealthy diet, overweight and obesity. However, to design effective policies, it is important to understand why people make unhealthy dietary choices. Research from behavioural economics suggests a critical role for time discounting, which describes how people's value of a reward, such as better health, decreases with delay to its receipt. We systematically reviewed the literature on the relationship of time discounting with unhealthy diets, overweight and obesity in Web of Science and PubMed. We identified 41 studies that met our inclusion criteria as they examined the association between time discount rates and (i) unhealthy food consumption; (ii) overweight and (iii) response to dietary and weight loss interve

SUBMITTER: Barlow P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4988386 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature