"Just-in-time" but a bit delayed: Personalizing digital nudges for healthier online food choices.

As food choices are increasingly made in contexts such as online supermarkets, nudging has been extrapolated to the digital sphere. Digitalization poses unique opportunities to enhance the promotion of healthier food choices online: Digital nudges can be delivered "just-in-time" (JIT), in response to the initial selection of an unhealthy product. Furthermore, digital JIT nudges can be personalized to match user characteristics of behavioral relevance, such as one's food and cognitive processing preferences.

Examining the neural correlates of goal priming with the NeuroShop, a novel virtual reality fMRI paradigm.

Objective: Health goal priming has been shown to stimulate healthy food choices by activating an individual's weight-control goal. The present study combined fMRI with a novel virtual reality food choice task to elucidate the underlying neural mechanisms of health goal priming. Previous research has suggested that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) play a role in the incorporation of health considerations into the food choice process.

Neural activity in self-related brain regions in response to tailored nutritional messages predicts dietary change.

Overweight and obesity have become international public health problems, so there is an urgent need to implement effective interventions that prevent these concerning health issues. Designing personalized (tailored) dietary communications has become one of the most effective tools in reducing unhealthy eating behavior, when compared with one-size-fits-all messages (untailored). However, more research is required to gain a complete understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which tailored nutritional messages elicit reductions in unhealthy dietary behavior.