Reordering food options on delivery apps could help to reduce obesity
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Obesity is one of the biggest health challenges in the UK. Most people would like to keep to a healthy weight but this has become extremely difficult in a world that constantly pushes us towards eating too much.
This paper explores whether reordering food options on delivery apps could help reduce obesity. Together with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) and the University of Oxford, we carried out a UK-wide experiment involving more than 7,000 participants. They were asked to order food using one of four simulated food delivery apps. We discovered that simply repositioning options in relation to their calorie content significantly reduced the amount of calories ordered.
Authors

Filippo Bianchi
Filippo Bianchi
Lead Behavioural Scientist, healthy life mission
Filippo leads the behavioural science workstream of the A Healthy Life Mission
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Jonathan Bone
Jonathan Bone
Mission Manager, healthy life mission
Jonathan works within Nesta Cymru (Wales), focusing on working across public, private and non-profit sectors to deliver innovative solutions that tackle obesity and loneliness in Wales.
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Jovita Leung
Jovita Leung
Jovita is an Associate Advisor within BIT's health team. Before joining BIT, she worked as a research assistant at UCL on multiple projects looking at adolescents’ social and cognitive…

James Farrington
James Farrington
James Farrington is Associate Research Advisor at BIT

Dr Abigail Mottershaw
Dr Abigail Mottershaw
Abigail is Online Experiments Lead at BIT, working within the Research and Evaluation team.

Filip Murar
Filip Murar
Filip is a Senior Research Advisor in BIT's Research and Evaluation team.

Stefan Kelly
Stefan Kelly
Stefan is a behavioural scientist in Nesta’s fairer start mission team, he is currently on secondment from The Behavioural Insights Team.