The suggestive power of wholesomeness
From John Tierney’s TierneyLab blog on NYT:
One of these restaurants was called “Good Karma Healthy Foods” and its menu included healthy choices such as cream of carrot soup (90 calories). The other restaurant was called “Jim’s Hearty Sandwiches” and its menu included high-calorie foods such as “Beef on a Wick” (800 calories).
We found that, just as in the other studies, people underestimated the number of calories of the same meal (a sandwich and a soda) when it was on the menu of the healthy restaurant compared to when it was on the menu of the unhealthy restaurant, and consequently were more likely to order chips in the healthy restaurant condition.
In another experiment, Dr. Wansink and Dr. Chandon showed people cups of granola and cups of M&Ms, two snacks containing about the same amount of calories per ounce. Some of the cups were labeled “Regular” and some were labeled “Low Fat” (even though there’s no such thing as low-fat M&Ms). As predicted, people significantly underestimated the calories in the “low-fat” varieties, and they compensated by raising their estimates of the “appropriate” serving size of each snack.
The low-fat labels also lessened the guilt associated with eating either snack — particularly the granola, which had a healthier (and less tasty, or “hedonic”) image in people’s minds even though it was just as caloric. Both normal-weight and overweight people said they’d feel little guilt about eating the “low-fat” granola. And while normal-weight people expressed guilt at eating even the “low-fat” M&Ms, overweight people “viewed the low-fat M&Ms as basically guilt-free,” according to Dr. Wansink and Dr. Chandon.
The researchers drew three conclusions from their series of experiments with snacks and foods in restaurants:
– Labeling snacks as low fat increases food intake during a single consumption occasion by up to 50 percent. This is robust across hedonic and utilitarian snacks, across young and old consumers, across self-reported nutrition experts and novices, in public and private consumption settings, and regardless of whether people serve themselves or not.
– For overweight people, low-fat labeling increases their consumption of all foods.
– Objective serving-size information prevents normal-weight people from overeating foods labeled as low fat. It does not influence overweight people.