The present research aimed to investigate the impact of the physical activity calorie equivalent (PACE) front-of-pack label on consumption, prospective consumption and liking of familiar and unfamiliar discretionary snack foods.

In a within-subject randomised design, participants tasted and rated liking (9-point hedonic scale) and prospective consumption (9-point category scale) of four different snack foods with four different labels (i.e. blank, fake, PACE, PACE doubled) and four control snack foods. The twenty snack foods were presented during two 45 min sessions (i.e. ten snack foods per session) which were separated by one week. The amount participants sampled of each snack food was measured.

The study was conducted in the Centre for Advanced Sensory Sciences laboratory at Deakin University, Australia.

The participants were 153 university students (126 females, twenty-seven males, mean age 24·3 (sd 4·9) years) currently enrolled in an undergraduate nutrition degree at Deakin University.

When the PACE label was present on familiar snack foods, participants sampled 9·9 % (22·8 (sem 1·4) v. 25·3 (sem 1·5) g, P=0·03) less than when such label was not present. This was in line with a decreased prospective snack food consumption of 9·1 % (3·0 (sem 0·2) v. 3·3 (sem 0·2) servings, P=0·03). Such pattern was not seen in unfamiliar snacks.

The PACE label appears to be a promising way to decrease familiar discretionary snack food consumption in young, health-minded participants.

It is often assumed that there are substantial sex differences in eating behaviour (e.g. women are more likely to be dieters or emotional eaters than men). The present study investigates this assumption in a large representative community sample while incorporating a comprehensive set of psychological eating-related variables.

A community sample was employed to: (i) determine sex differences in (un)healthy snack consumption and psychological eating-related variables (e.g. emotional eating, intention to eat healthily); (ii) examine whether sex predicts energy intake from (un)healthy snacks over and above psychological variables; and (iii) investigate the relationship between psychological variables and snack intake for men and women separately. Snack consumption was assessed with a 7d snack diary; the psychological eating-related variables with questionnaires.

Participants were members of an Internet survey panel that is based on a true probability sample of households in the Netherlands.

Men and women (n 1292; 45 % male), with a mean age of 51·23 (sd 16·78) years and a mean BMI of 25·62 (sd 4·75) kg/m2.

Results revealed that women consumed more healthy and less unhealthy snacks than men and they scored higher than men on emotional and restrained eating. Women also more often reported appearance and health-related concerns about their eating behaviour, but men and women did not differ with regard to external eating or their intentions to eat more healthily. The relationships between psychological eating-related variables and snack intake were similar for men and women, indicating that snack intake is predicted by the same variables for men and women.

It is concluded that some small sex differences in psychological eating-related variables exist, but based on the present data there is no need for interventions aimed at promoting healthy eating to target different predictors according to sex.