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Determinants of consumer acceptance of sustainable healthy dietary recommendations
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Date
2025-12-19
Authors
Bourke, Bríd C.
Journal Title
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Volume Title
Publisher
University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
Background and Aim: A great food transformation programme is called for by multiple actors across both health and environmental domains. Transforming consumers’ dietary behaviours towards sustainable healthy choices confers concurrent advantages upon both planetary and human health goals. Yet behavioural shifts toward more sustainable food choices appear to be occurring at an exceedingly slow pace, with some indicators suggesting regressive consumption patterns. The baseline from which change must occur remains suboptimal: the average consumer diet fails to meet the current recommended healthy requirements and food related net zero targets are lagging. Nutrition researchers have called for numerous dietary changes in support of sustainable healthy eating. One such call is for consumers to transition from a diet rich in animal proteins towards a plant-rich diet. However, shifting diets towards plant-rich choices presents significant behaviour change challenges given the complexity of consumers’ dietary related beliefs, attitudes, and motives. At the level of individual factors, it is unclear how belief formation and transformation towards the novel, hybrid phenomenon of a ‘sustainable healthy diet’ occurs, and deep consumer insights into openness and resistance to revised food based dietary guidelines are needed. The primary aim of this research is to explore the mechanisms of changing dietary beliefs in response to unexpected information. Through the lens of Transformative Learning Theory, this research focuses on associations amongst disorienting dilemmas, affective constructs, cognitive conflict, and accessibility of beliefs for challenge and change to further understanding of the factors involved in consumers’ openness towards a dietary protein transition.
Methods: The research adopts a pragmatist/interpretivist paradigm, which aligns with a social constructivist ontological stance. Within this stance, it is acknowledged that reality is socially constructed and dynamic, and that knowledge is shaped by the individual’s interpretations, meanings and lived experiences. Furthermore, the research adopts a problem orientation lens to facilitate the uncovering of solutions to the practical human issue of dietary behaviour change towards sustainable choices. A multi-stage, exploratory sequential mixed methods design was constructed to address the research aim and objectives. Phase 1 of the qualitative research comprised 25 semi-structured exit-style interviews with volunteers from a separate phase of the research, where motivated-to-change participants completed a 12-week dietary intervention designed to test the nutritional adequacy of sustainable and healthy diets. The second qualitative phase followed, using visual cues designed based on Phase I data, to explore amotivated participants’ cognitive, conative and affective responses in 24 semi-structured interviews. Data from both phases informed the design of a quantitative instrument, and in a Phase 3, an on-line survey of 1000 omnivores, taking measures of attitudes, social norms, perceived behavioural control, emotion evaluations, identity, and subjective knowledge, sought to identify characteristics based on openness or resistance towards a hypothetical meat-reduction dietary recommendation.
Findings: Phase 1 found that unexpected dietary information provoked disorientation in the form of cognitive emotions of perplexity, apprehension and overwhelm. Participants suspended embedded beliefs while engaging in a period of conscious effortful change. Positive belief outcomes were related to consciousness raising, meaning perspective transformation and self-efficacy. Negative belief outcomes were related to compensatory behaviours and habit-strength. Phase 2 findings identified evoked emotions of curiosity and excite associated with acceptance, while rejection was shaped both by affect heuristics of moral judgement and distrust, and evoked emotions of contempt, boredom, and perplex. In phase 3, through cluster analysis, four distinct attitudinal-based consumer segments emerged: Embracer, Incliner, Resistor, and Rejector. Differences in openness were associated with profile characteristics including behaviour outcome evaluations, identity, emotion evaluation and subjective knowledge.
Research Contribution: This research contributes by providing empirical evidence for the disorienting and affective nature of appraisals of unexpected information on belief formation. Furthermore, this research contributes through the provision of behaviour- and context-specific psychosocial constructs that, together with sociodemographic data, facilitate identification of consumer profiles that offer novel insights into understanding openness and resistance towards plant-rich dietary recommendations. While the results identify a large proportion of the population who are open to a protein transition recommendation, new approaches are needed for those consumers who are particularly resistant and may respond in unintended ways, and for whom alternative routes to sustainable diets are essential. Such insights can inform dissemination of food based dietary guidelines revised towards sustainability.
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Keywords
Consumer behaviour , Sustainable healthy diets , Belief Transformation , Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) , Motivation, amotivation and maintenance , Behaviour change , Transformative Learning Theory (TLT) , Protein transition , Consumer segmentation , Consumer openess and resistance , Disorienting dilemmas , Evoked emotions
Citation
Bourke, B. C. 2025. Determinants of consumer acceptance of sustainable healthy dietary recommendations. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.