I hate texting.

I learned how to do it so I could chat with my kids, but I much prefer e-mail.

Chapman says I’m old, and the whole e-mail thing just passed by these kids.

The hardest lesson to teach any student working in my lab over the past 15 years was, check your e-mail.

When I went to Disney with food safety Frank in 2008, I was most impressed that he had all his chefs in the 20-something resorts checking their Blackberries every couple of minutes.

That’s the way I ran my lab.

But, I have kids, and they slowly drag the old man along to the new technology, and texting.

A Curtin University-led study (that’s in Australia) shows young adults are more apt to develop automatic, regular and long-lasting food-safety behaviors if a habit is formed.

However, this formation doesn’t have to be linked to education or motivation, but simply created with regular cues that prompt action.

Curtin University Associate Professor Barbara Mullan says the work flips the usual habit paradigm.

“There is a lot of research into how we break bad habits, particularly in clinical psychology, in areas such as obsessive-compulsion disorder,” Mullan says.

“But there’s very little about how humans establish good habits.

“Previous studies that do have largely involved people with a motivation to change, such as losing weight or exercising more, but we felt there was a lot of noise in that data.

“We wanted to strip the question of back to the purest level of ‘how long do people have to repeat an action for it to become automatic?'”

To answer that question, they drew on recent research which found microwaving a dishcloth—a major source of kitchen cross-contamination—for one minute was an effective method of sterilisation.

They enlisted 45 undergraduate students and divided them into three groups, two which received a reminder poster and text-message prompts every three and five days respectively to microwave their dishcloth, and a control group who received no reminders.

The test period lasted for three weeks, with a follow-up done three weeks after completion.

This follow-up revealed that a significant number of those given cues to act were still performing the habit, while those in the control group were not.

“The results are particularly important as they demonstrate that a relatively simple intervention was sufficient to change and maintain behavior,” A/Prof Mullan says.

“This suggests focusing on habit formation is a better strategy than attempting to change or improve behaviors through education or instruction, which have been shown to be largely ineffective.

“And they remove the need for motivation. While a person’s intentions may be good, intention does not always lead to behavior change.”

Mullan says they chose students as participants due to young adults being a population at a higher risk of experiencing foodborne illness, which affects a quarter of Australians each year.

The researchers are now looking at cue sensitivity and if sequences of habits can be built, including checking expiry dates and fridge temperatures.