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

Objective: 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. Methods: 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. Results: 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. Conclusions: 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.