Does Healthy Cooking Lead to Healthy Choices? Exploring the Impact of a Virtual Reality Cooking Game on Healthy...

Cooking plays a crucial role in healthy eating, and food exposure during cooking significantly influences people's health and well-being. Given the challenges faced by novice cooks and the general lack of interest in cooking, this research proposes utilizing a highly engaging cooking game as an alternative to real-life cooking, allowing individuals to achieve the same health-boosting benefits as traditional cooking while enjoying the game. Additionally, this study will examine the moderating role of food type and cooking manner in this process.

Two preregistered behavioral experiments (N_study1 = 60, N_study2 = 54) were conducted to examine how using different types of food (healthy vs. unhealthy) in a cooking game affects subsequent food choices, and how the cooking manner (neat vs. messy) moderates this effect.

Study 1 found that cooking healthy food led to healthier food choices after gaming. Study 2 revealed a significant moderating effect of cooking manner: When cooking healthy food, a neat cooking manner led individuals to subsequently choose fewer healthy foods, while a messy cooking manner led to an increase; conversely, when cooking unhealthy food, participants who cooked neatly chose more healthy food, while those who cooked messily chose less healthy food.

These findings suggest that an engaging cooking game could replace real-life cooking as a direct and effective strategy to promote healthy eating. The results also highlight the importance of context-specific strategies in designing and implementing health interventions to prevent unintended consequences arising from excessive cues.