SALT LAKE CITY — As Mother’s Day approaches, it’s common to reflect on all the ways that moms influence our lives. In particular, many mothers are the gatekeepers of our households' eating habits.

A nutritional gatekeeper can been defined as the person who influences most of the household food decisions, typically by doing more of the food shopping and preparation. The nutritional gatekeeper role is based on each household’s unique needs.

Food-related activities may differ, for example, based on the variety of household structures such as multi-generational families or nontraditional households and based on the needs of family members such as aging parents and grown children or grandchildren who live outside the home.

Making food decisions

No matter how the food-related decisions and tasks are divided, household members who do the food shopping and preparation contribute significantly to food choices, perhaps more than we realize, and for better or for worse. In fact, some research reports that nutritional gatekeepers control about 72 percent of all food decisions for the household, including foods consumed both in and outside of the home.

Consider the case where a nutritional gatekeeper prepares healthier meals to better manage his or her own health, thereby positively affecting the eating habits of the rest of the household. Then compare this with the gatekeeper who prefers eating out or who keeps sweets and chips in the kitchen cabinets for snacking.

In some cases, it may even feel like the gatekeeper is purposely sabotaging household efforts to eat healthier. Yet the gatekeeper may not even realize the extent of his or her influence on the eating habits of others in the household.

Guardians of healthier eating

Given the influence of the nutritional gatekeepers on food decisions, it makes sense to provide resources for them to be guardians of household health. In particular, the Health Belief Model is a research-based framework that helps explain health-related decisions and thereby suggests the types of support that may be most helpful in health behavior change.

Using the Health Belief Model as a reference to understand the nutritional gatekeeper's decisions about purchasing and preparing healthy foods, we must consider factors such as the gatekeeper’s own beliefs about food choices. How gatekeepers understands the benefits of healthy eating, what their own barriers to healthy eating might be, their confidence in their own ability to purchase and prepare healthier foods and how they see foods affecting health and risk for disease may all influence their food-related decisions.

The nutritional gatekeeper in your household may need support in the following areas:

• Exploring the health and other benefits of healthier food choices
• Identifying and overcoming barriers to shopping/preparing healthier foods
• Building confidence in healthy food shopping/preparation

Household collaboration helps

It’s important to recognize the significant contribution that nutritional gatekeepers make to each household’s overall health, as well as the time, energy and other resources involved. In particular, individual members of the household can collaborate to support the nutritional gatekeeper, making it easier for all household members to eat healthier.

Identifying and creating a household plan for grocery shopping and preparing healthier foods can make it easier for the nutritional gatekeeper to overcome barriers and accomplish their food-related tasks.

Related:

Transform your eating habits one homemade meal at a time

Everything I needed to know in life I may have learned in my mother’s kitchen. The wonderful smell of home-cooked foods when I returned home from school was the beginning of building lasting healthy eating habits maintained into my adult years.

These barriers might include the amount of time involved in food shopping or prep, concerns about finances, dislike of flavors/taste of certain “healthy” foods, and perception that others will not accept “healthy” food items. Options to address these barriers might include helping with grocery shopping, creating a food budget, exploring flavorful recipes and eating meals together in the household more often.

It’s also important to discuss the household goal of eating healthier with individual family members and to identify ways that their food and other personal preferences can be included.

Cooking skills count

Building cooking skills may also help support confidence of the nutritional gatekeeper and the gatekeeper's ability to positively influence the eating habits of the household. Some research confirms this idea. This was in part due to the wider variety of foods served by skillful cooks and also makes sense because foods may be more enjoyable when they’re prepared in a flavorful way.

This study by Dr. Brian Wansink also found that nine out of 10 “great cooks” can be described by the following cooking personality types:

• Giving cooks: Friendly, well–liked, enthusiastic cooks who specialize on comfort foods; seldom experiment with new dishes
• Healthy cooks: Optimistic, book–loving, nature enthusiasts who are most likely to experiment with fish and with fresh ingredients
• Innovative cooks: Most creative and trend–setting; experiment with ingredients, style and cooking methods
• Methodical cooks: Often weekend hobbyists who are talented, but who rely heavily on recipes
• Competitive cooks: The Iron Chef of the neighborhood; cook in order to impress others

It was only the giving cook who was less associated with healthier eating of the household. That’s because the giving cook tended to prepare more comfort foods as well as desserts that can contribute to unhealthy eating habits when consumed in excess.

Regardless of cooking personality or current cooking skill level of the nutritional gatekeeper in your household, it's important to bring more awareness to how much influence the gatekeeper has over eating habits and support him or her in making healthier food decisions so that all household members benefit.

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