Old minds, new marketplaces: How evolved psychological mechanisms trigger mismatched food preferences

Principally due to unhealthy food choices that people make in grocery stores, almost half of adults worldwide are overweight and obese. Current food retail practices bear some responsibility for such public health issues. This paper argues that numerous attempts to promote healthy eating fail due to neglecting evolutionarily outdated food acquisition mechanisms. To understand underlying motives behind food choices, we distinguish proximate and ultimate explanations of consumer behavior, which complement the traditional approach to studying consumer behavior. Building on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis and contrasting ancestral versus present-day foraging environments, we discuss how marketing activities exploit evolutionarily old food preferences and elicit unhealthy food choices. We conclude by explaining how to mitigate this harmful trend by applying the law of law’s leverage to facilitate effective strategies to increase healthy food choices. Notably, we show how evolutionary psychology principles can be used to reconcile competing interests between consumers, retailers, and decision-makers responsible for public health policies.