Cook it yourself to cherish it more, says a new study

The way notion of cooking has evolved is something really admirable. To cook food is a pleasure, to cook healthy food is admiration and doing it all by yourself is divinity. This is not an exaggerated statement but a proven fact now. A recent survey says that people like food more when they make it themselves. The joy gets doubled when the food they cook is healthy. This study hails two major aspects of food, the way you make it and the nutritional value.

Self-cooked food shall be savored more

This study which was published in the journal, Health Psychology was conducted on around 120 women. These women were told to taste milkshakes that contained either all the healthy ingredients or the unhealthy ingredients. The procedure was also of two different types. The milkshakes were either made by someone else or were prepared by the population of the survey themselves. After the tasting procedure, all the ladies were told to rate the milkshake on the basis of how much they liked it and how much healthy did they find it.

All those women who made the milkshake themselves were given two recipes. The first one had an ingredient list which was a recipe for low-calorie raspberry milkshake. The other one had a recipe for high-calorie chocolate milkshake. Then later on, they were to taste either the milkshake they made themselves or the milkshake made by others. For every group, the shake was freshly made and the women were given the recipe and the ingredients for the shakes they tasted. After the tasting process, they were supposed to give their reviews unbiased.

Not concrete but well thought research

After thorough research, the researchers found that the women were more likely to enjoy the healthier milkshake if they made it themselves. There was no special verdict for the unhealthy milkshake that was self-prepared. As per the researchers, “The findings suggest that self-preparation increases the health salience of foods, because when people prepare foods, they become more aware of the ingredients that constitute a food”. The researchers called it the “IKEA Effect”. As per this effect, people end up giving higher status to the objects that they create themselves. “According to this, people like self-made objects more than objects that were created by someone else because they have put more effort in these self-made objects. In addition, these efforts feel rewarding, because self-created products also signal competence to the self and others”.

Though, one cannot completely rely on the study. One of the reasons behind this was the extremely limited size of research population. Also there was no other food involved apart from the milkshakes. That makes the recipe size highly restricted. We will need a deeper research to understand the reason behind the fact that women preferred healthy milkshakes made by themselves. There should be a more concrete and deeper story behind it. But the authors argue that these campaigns will promote healthy eating. “Public health programs could promote home food preparation by, for example, providing families with simple but healthy recipes in order to foster healthy eating at home”, conclude the authors.