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How to make healthy food choices the preferred ones is a public health concern worldwide. A promising way could be to utilize the sensory food cues in the environment, such as odors. Previous studies have shown conflicting results on whether odors can impact food choice, and its underlying mechanism remains unclear. The current study aims to investigate the effect of sweet food odors on food choices. A total of 53 participants were recruited to complete two sessions of different sweet odor exposure: healthy (apple, honey melon) or unhealthy (chocolate, caramel). In each session, the participants were asked to choose from eight (in-)congruent food products (an unhealthy and healthy option for each of the odors) after 10 min odor exposure. Visual attention to the food products was measured by Tobii Pro Glasses 2 eye-tracker. Results showed that healthy food products were chosen more frequently regardless of the (healthiness of the) odor exposure. Moreover, participants fixated on all food products for a longer time and more often, and showed a longer time to first fixation on food products during healthy odor exposure compared to unhealthy odor exposure. These findings indicate that healthy odors can prime visual attention and orientation towards both healthy and unhealthy foods. However, this priming does not necessarily lead to congruent food choices, and other cognitive factors likely play a role in the final food decision-making.

Modern people live in an environment with ubiquitous food cues, including food advertisements, videos, and smells. Do these food cues change people's eating behavior? Since diet plays a crucial role in maintaining health, it has been researched for decades. As convenient alternatives for real food, food images are widely used in diet research. To date, researchers from Germany, Spain, and other countries have established food photo databases; however, these food pictures are not completely suitable for Chinese studies because of the ingredients and characteristics of Chinese food. The main goal of this research is to create a library of Chinese food images and to provide as complete a data reference as possible for future studies that use food images as experimental material. After standardized processing, we selected 508 common Chinese food pictures with high familiarity and recognizability and attached detailed classifications concerning taste, macronutrients, calories, and participants' emotional responses to the pictures. Additionally, with food pictures as material, we conducted research on how people make dietary decisions in order to identify the variables that may affect a person's food choices. The effects of individual perceived healthiness and palatability, gender, BMI, family income, and levels of emotional and restricted eating were examined using eating decisions based on healthiness and palatability as dependent variables. The results showed that people with low household incomes are more likely to be influenced by food taste in their dietary decision-making process, while individuals with high household incomes are more likely to consider the healthy aspects of food. Moreover, parental BMI affects what children consume, with children who have parents with higher BMIs being more prone to overlook the healthiness value of food.