The Relationship Between Food Choice and the Degree of Impulsivity, Self-Control, Attitudes Toward Health and Taste

The fundamental problem faced by any person when making decisions related to food choices is fin-ding a compromise between a product’s health benefits and its taste. Solving this problem depends on nume-rous factors; however, studies most often highlight the influence of four key variables: impulsivity, self-control level, health attitudes, and taste preferences. Based on these factors, a study was conducted to investigate the associations between impulsivity, self-control level, health attitudes, and taste preferences with food choices in multiple-choice tasks. The study involved 340 participants aged 18 to 60 years (M = 25.1; SD = 8.7), 72.1% of whom were women. The research methods included food multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions to assess temporal discounting, the Brief Self-Control Scale, the Health and Taste Attitude Scales. The results demonstrated a relationship between the health and taste attitude factors and food choice. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the independent roles of the health and taste attitudes as key predictors, only weakly reducible to a single latent factor. The findings underscore the need to account for situational and cognitive aspects in future studies of eating behavior. Measures of impulsivity and self-control did not show a significant effect on food choice and remain statistically distinct constructs in the most adequate model.