Obesity, overconsumption and self-regulation failure: The unsung role of eating appropriateness standards

There is a tendency to blame the so-called ‘obesogenic’ environment, characterised by the abundant presence of high caloric, palatable foods, for the failure of self-regulation of eating behaviour and, consequently, the obesity epidemic. In the present article, it is argued that in addition to the omnipresence of food, self-regulation of eating is also compromised by a lack of clear, shared standards that guide eating behaviour. We posit that this social aspect of the toxic food environment is often overlooked and that, without considering the importance of such social eating appropriateness standards as self-regulatory guides, any understanding of successful regulation of eating behaviour will remain incomplete. We hypothesise that the availability of clear, shared eating appropriateness standards will decrease the uncertainty resulting from the current lack of such standards, and will provide effective guidance of eating behaviour, thus calling for a new generation of empirical research examining this novel approach to core components of the obesogenic environment.