Supposedly, shoppers have become savvier and more attentive to the food they buy -- consider New York City's ban on trans-fats in restaurants.
However, more and more food is being marketed as healthier than it actually is, leading to the so-called “health halo” effect, where customers underestimating the calorie content in certain foods.
Peruse the aisles of your grocery store to get a hint of the confusion food packaging poses: What exactly does trans-fat free mean? What’s the actual difference between a reduced-fat cookie and a regular one? How about an organic cookie? Americans have had an obsession with food and nutrition for years, but the collective waistline of the United States grows each year.
To get to the heart of the matter, The New York Times surveyed people on the streets of Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Armed with images of meals created by marketing professors, he aimed to see how food labeling and food marketing affected the estimated number of calories in those meals. The first was of Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad and a 20-ounce Pepsi. The average estimate of the calorie content was 1,011 while the actual content was 934. A second image of the same meal plus two Fortt’s brand crackers, prominently labeled “trans-fat free”, was shown to another group of people. Their average estimate was of 835 calories; the actual content was 1,034. More food for fewer calories – every dieter’s dream.
Dr. Pierre Chandon, a marketing professor at the Insead business school in Fontainebleau, France has been studying how food labeling has impacted the perceptions of the healthfulness of certain foods. In one experiment, he asked people to choose between a Big Mac and a 12 inch meatball sandwich from Subway. Subway, as you may know, touts itself as the healthy fast-food alternative and was the professed diet-food of a once morbidly obese Jared Fogle. Most opted for the sandwich even though it had more calories. In addition, Chandon found that oftentimes customers at Subway added non-diet soda and cookies to their orders and ended up with meals that contained 56 percent more calories than the meals ordered from McDonald’s.
“People who eat at McDonald’s know their sins,” he told the Times, “but people at Subway think that a 1,000-calorie sandwich has only 500 calories.” Chandon urges food companies to clearly label calorie content on the front of packages and on menus. He advises people to say to themselves: “This restaurant or this brand claims to be healthy in general. Let’s see if I can come up with two reasons why this claim would not apply to this particular food.”
Just remember, when Fogle shed nearly 250 pounds on his all Subway diet, he ate sandwiches with only lettuce and mustard in them for dinner.
SOURCE: The New York Times
