Elizabeth Harrington of the Washington Free Beacon details an unusual taxpayer-funded anti-obesity measure.
The National Institutes of Health is spending over $400,000 on a study tracking the eye movements of Latinos and their children at grocery stores in a bid to fight obesity.
The study at San Diego State University is using “eye-tracking technology” to determine how overweight people make their decisions on what to buy at the grocery. Researchers hope they can identify strategies for changing groceries to nudge people into choosing options they consider healthier.
“This two-year, mixed-methods study will use eye-tracking technology to identify aspects of the in-store environment that cue parents’ and children’s purchase requests,” according to the grant for the project.
The study is examining how grocery stores display products on shelves, as well as how parents interact with their children when shopping.
Parents and children “will each wear eye-tracking glasses during a single grocery shopping trip that capture visual and audio data for the entire shopping trip from both the parent’s and the child’s perspectives.”
