Carryover habit describes meal decisions affected by previous meals. The authors found that what we eat at a meal say, breakfast is more influenced by what we ate at the same meal the previous day than by the other prior meals. Breakfast has the strongest "carryover effect," possibly because we have less time to decide what to eat for breakfast and the most consistent environment for this meal.
Since we tend to eat more "good" nutrients, like calcium, at breakfast and more "bad" nutrients, like saturated fat, at dinner, this carryover might actually be beneficial. However, when the authors examined how much of each nutrient tended to be consumed at each meal, they found that people with a "baseline habit" consistently varied how much of each nutrient they ate according to what meal it was.
"Daily meals are associated with different food values," write the authors.
The authors suggest that instead of providing daily nutritional goals, we might want to embrace multi-day nutritional goals, taking into account how one day's meals affect the next day's meals. Also, knowing that we tend to approach dinner with a different set of habits, can help us look at nutritional goals with more clarity.
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Contact: Suzanne Wu
swu@press.uchicago.edu
773-834-0386
University of Chicago Press Journals
30-Jan-2006