Psychosocial context and food healthiness in top-grossing American films.

Objective: Healthy eating is shaped by the context. To understand how healthy eating is modeled in popular media, this systematic analysis quantified which contextual factors, character behaviors, and character demographics were associated with food healthiness in popular movies.

Method: Two researchers content-coded the contextual factors, character behaviors, and character demographics depicted across 9,093 foods in 244 top-grossing Hollywood movies released from 1994-2018. Food healthiness was calculated using the Nutrient Profile Index (0 = 100 = ) and coder reliability was assessed. Mixed effects regression models tested whether food healthiness was associated with contextual factors (e.g., geographic locations, social consumption situations, celebrations, foreground placement), character behaviors (actual consumption, food evaluations), and character demographics.

Results: Confirming six preregistered hypotheses (all < .001), foods were less healthy when they were in American versus non-American settings (95% CI: Cohen's = .29-.39), part of social consumption situations ( = .19-.28) and celebrations ( = .04-.17), and in the foreground versus background ( = .15-.24). The foods that characters actually consumed ( = .30-.42) and evaluated positively (vs. negatively, = .37-.76) were also less healthy. However, disconfirming a gender hypothesis, female characters did not consume healthier foods than males ( = -.11-.13, = .45).

Conclusions: Top-grossing Hollywood movies depict different contexts and different character behaviors for healthier versus less healthy foods. Research is needed to understand whether depicting healthy foods in different contexts impacts viewers' beliefs and behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).