Understanding Food Behaviour: Factors Influencing What We Eat

Why does a Bengali household celebrate with hilsa and mustard sauce while a Gujarati family marks the same occasion with thepla and shrikhand? Why do some people reach for biscuits the moment they feel anxious, while others lose appetite entirely? Food behaviour is the sum of every decision we make about eating, and it is shaped by far more than just hunger. It sits at the crossroads of biology, culture, economics, emotions, and social expectation, making it one of the most fascinating areas of study in public nutrition.

What is food behaviour? 🔗

Food behaviour refers to the entire set of habits, choices, attitudes, and practices that determine what a person eats, when they eat, how much they eat, and even how they eat it. It is not a single action but a pattern built over a lifetime. A child who is fed sweetened milk at every meal develops a preference for sugar. A family that eats together at a fixed time develops a rhythm of hunger and satiety that follows that schedule. These patterns, repeated thousands of times, become food behaviour.

For public health professionals, understanding food behaviour matters because diet is directly linked to the burden of disease. Non-communicable diseases accounted for 63% of all deaths in India in 2016, and most of these are diet-related. Changing the nutritional status of a population is therefore not just about producing more food or fortifying staples; it is about understanding why people eat the way they do, and what would make them eat differently.

The building blocks of food behaviour 🔗

Three broad categories of influence shape food behaviour. The first is physiological, the biological signals of hunger and satiety. The second is psychological, including emotions, stress, mood, and learned associations. The third is sociocultural, which covers family, religion, community, gender, region, and economic status. These categories overlap constantly. A festival meal, for example, is cultural, but it also triggers physiological responses and emotional memories.

Physiological factors: the biology of eating 🔗

At the most basic level, eating is regulated by hormones and the nervous system. Two hormones do most of the work. Ghrelin and leptin signals regulate sensations of hunger and satiety by sending signals to different nuclei within the hypothalamus, the appetite-control centre of the brain.

Hunger and the role of ghrelin 🔗

Ghrelin is often called the “hunger hormone”. It is released by the stomach when it is empty, and its levels rise sharply just before a usual mealtime. Once ghrelin reaches the hypothalamus, it triggers the urge to find and eat food. After a meal, ghrelin levels drop and the urge subsides. This is why people who skip meals often feel uncontrollably hungry later, leading to overeating at the next meal.

Satiety and the role of leptin 🔗

Leptin works in the opposite direction. It is produced by fat cells and tells the brain that the body has enough stored energy. Circulating leptin levels are directly proportional to the amount of body fat, which means leptin reflects long-term energy stores rather than the contents of the last meal. When this signalling system breaks down, as it often does in obesity, the brain stops responding properly to fullness signals and overeating becomes the new normal.

Other physiological influences 🔗

Beyond these two hormones, several other biological factors shape what we eat. Blood sugar levels, sleep, the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, lactation, illness, and ageing all change appetite and food preference. Pregnant women often develop strong cravings or aversions. Older adults frequently lose their sense of taste and smell, which can lead to reduced food intake and undernutrition. Children in growth spurts eat more than their parents in absolute terms.

Psychological factors: why we eat when we are not hungry 🔗

Most people have eaten a packet of chips while watching television without realising it, or finished a plate of mishti after a stressful day at college. These are examples of psychological eating, where mood and mental state override physiological signals.

Stress, emotion, and food 🔗

Chronic stress raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which is linked to increased appetite, particularly for foods high in sugar and fat. This is why exam season often coincides with weight gain among students, or why people working long hours tend to rely on quick, energy-dense snacks. Emotional eating is not a moral failing; it is a learned coping mechanism that often begins in childhood, when parents soothe a crying child with sweets.

Learned preferences and food memories 🔗

Taste is partly inherited and partly learned. Babies are born with a preference for sweet flavours and an aversion to bitter ones, but most other preferences are built through repeated exposure. A child who grows up eating rasam learns to enjoy tamarind sourness; a child who never tastes it may find it unpleasant as an adult. Food memories also carry strong emotional weight, which is why people often crave the dishes their mothers or grandmothers cooked, especially during stressful or homesick periods.

Body image and disordered eating 🔗

Psychological factors can also push behaviour in damaging directions. Concerns about body image, often driven by social media, are increasingly linked to restrictive eating, skipping meals, and disordered eating among young Indians. Adolescent boys may overeat to gain muscle; adolescent girls may undereat to stay thin. Both extremes carry serious nutritional consequences.

Cultural influences: tradition on the plate 🔗

If biology were the only force behind eating, every human being would eat roughly the same diet. Instead, food varies enormously from one community to another, and this variation is mostly cultural. Culture decides which substances are considered food at all, how they are prepared, who eats them, and on what occasion.

Religion and dietary rules 🔗

Religion is one of the strongest cultural forces shaping Indian diets. Many Hindu communities follow a lacto-vegetarian diet, avoiding meat, fish, and eggs while accepting milk and milk products. Jain dietary practice goes further, also avoiding root vegetables such as onion, garlic, and potato. Muslims observe halal rules and abstain from pork, and during Ramzan they fast from dawn to sunset for a month. Sikhs may avoid beef and ritually slaughtered meat. These rules are not just about what is eaten but about identity and belonging.

Regional cuisine 🔗

Geography shapes cuisine through climate, soil, and historical trade routes. The rice-and-fish belt of Bengal and coastal Andhra reflects abundant water and seafood. The wheat-and-dairy belt of Punjab and Haryana reflects fertile plains and pastoral traditions. Coconut dominates Kerala cooking; mustard oil dominates Bengali cooking; groundnut oil dominates Maharashtrian cooking. Research from Chandigarh has shown that social and cultural norms, along with ecological factors, strongly shape traditional food choices even within a single city of mixed communities.

Festivals and food 🔗

Festivals are concentrated moments of food behaviour. Diwali means sweets and fried snacks. Eid means biryani and sheer khurma. Pongal means freshly harvested rice cooked with jaggery. Onam means a sadya served on a banana leaf. These foods are not chosen at random; they carry symbolic meaning, mark the agricultural calendar, and reinforce community ties. A person who refuses festival food often feels socially isolated, which shows how powerful these traditions are.

Social influences: family, gender, and peers 🔗

Even within a single culture, food behaviour varies sharply by household and by social position within that household.

Family dynamics 🔗

The family is the first and strongest teacher of food behaviour. Children learn what to eat, how much to eat, and what attitudes to hold towards food by watching their parents and older siblings. In joint families, food decisions are often centralised, with one person, usually the mother or grandmother, deciding the day’s menu. In nuclear families, decisions are more fluid, and children may have greater influence over what is cooked, often pushing the family towards processed and packaged foods.

Gender roles and intra-household food distribution 🔗

One of the most striking features of food behaviour in India is its unequal distribution within the household. The prevalence of malnutrition among ever-married women stands at 55.3% as against 24.2% among ever-married men, a gap that cannot be explained by income alone. Cultural norms in many households expect women to eat last, after men and children have been served. This often leaves them with smaller portions and less preferred foods.

Research from the Tata-Cornell Institute found that differences in dietary diversity are concentrated in micronutrient-dense food groups, like dairy, meat or fish, green leafy vegetables, and vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables. In other words, even when a household has these foods, women may not actually eat them. This contributes directly to high rates of anaemia and undernutrition among Indian women, particularly in rural areas.

Peer influence and adolescence 🔗

Adolescents present a special case. As they spend more time outside the home, their food behaviour is increasingly shaped by friends, schoolmates, and what they see online. A scoping review of Indian adolescents found that unhealthy diet patterns, including more fried items, sugar-sweetened beverages, packaged food, and fast food, were strongly associated with peer influence and parental food behaviour. The packet of chips a teenager buys at the school canteen is rarely chosen alone; it is chosen in the company of friends doing the same.

Economic and environmental influences 🔗

Food behaviour is also constrained by what people can afford and what is available nearby. A community-based survey in Kochi found that participants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds prioritized price when purchasing foods, while higher-income groups paid more attention to health benefits, convenience, and sensory appeal. Urbanisation, the rise of supermarkets, aggressive marketing of packaged foods, and the explosion of food-delivery apps have all changed the Indian food environment dramatically over the past two decades. Cheap edible oils and refined cereals have become more affordable than fresh fruits and vegetables, which is one reason why obesity and undernutrition often coexist in the same community.

Why studying food behaviour matters for public nutrition 🔗

Nutrition programmes that ignore food behaviour rarely succeed. Distributing iron tablets does not help if women in the household still eat last and least. Fortifying rice does not help if a community avoids that rice for cultural reasons. Promoting fruits and vegetables does not help if local markets do not stock them or households cannot afford them. Government initiatives such as POSHAN Abhiyaan increasingly recognise that improving nutrition requires changing behaviour, not just supplying food. This means understanding why people eat what they eat, working with cultural traditions rather than against them, and addressing the social and gender inequalities that decide who gets fed first.

What do you think? Think about your own family’s eating patterns: who decides the menu, who eats first, and who eats last? How much of what you eat today is shaped by hunger, and how much by habit, emotion, or expectation?

References

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5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358090448_Food_Choices_and_Beliefs_Factors_Influencing_Dietary_Preferences_in_Chandigarh_India
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9117825/
7. https://tci.cornell.edu/?news=yes-women-in-india-are-consuming-a-less-diverse-diet
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9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13053941/
10. https://poshanabhiyaan.gov.in/