It has been scientifically proven: you do healthier grocery shopping with a shopping cart
Going to the supermarket with a rumbling stomach usually isn’t such a good idea. The chances of eventually standing at the checkout with a shopping basket full of chocolate, candy and ice cream are pretty high. And speaking of that shopping basket: if you’re planning to eat a little healthier, you’d better leave it behind too.
It turns out that people who do their shopping with a cart buy healthier food than people who carry a basket around the store. For a study, researchers at Erasmus University Rotterdam observed a number of shoppers and concluded that shoppers with a basket were almost seven times more likely to make unhealthy impulse purchases than people pushing a cart in front of them.
Huh, how is that possible?
Whether you carry a basket or push a cart, you come to the supermarket with the same goal and walk past roughly the same shelves. But how can it be that you shop more healthily with a cart than with a basket? According to the clever researchers in Rotterdam, it has to do with our posture. When pushing a cart, your arms are extended, while with a basket they are bent around your arm. And these different movements have different effects on our behavior.
There you have it
Doing something with a bent arm, such as eating or picking something up to look at it, is associated by our brain with something we want at that moment. The bent arm you have when carrying a basket therefore increases the likelihood of impulse purchases compared with using a cart, because your brain thinks you want something at that moment.
The healthier shopping has nothing to do with shopping lists, which cart pushers use more often than basket carriers. In the second round, the researchers sent both groups out with a list, and even then there was more candy in the baskets than in the carts.
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Source: Quest, Image: Albert Heijn
