“Healthy” perception leads to larger portions, says study

In a new study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, researchers found that when people eat what they consider to be healthy food, they eat more than the recommended serving size because they associate “healthy” with less filling.

The researchers from the University of Texas, Austin used a multi-method approach to investigate the “healthy = less filling” association. The first study was conducted with 50 undergraduate students at a large public university and employed something called the Implicit Association Test to provide evidence for an inverse relationship between the concepts of healthy and filling.

The second study was a field study conducted with 40 graduate students at a large public university and measured participants’ hunger levels after consuming a cookie that is either portrayed as healthy or unhealthy to test the effect of health portrayals on experienced hunger levels.

The third study was conducted with 72 undergraduate students in a realistic scenario to measure the impact of health portrayals on the amount of food ordered before watching a short film and the actual amount of food consumed during the film.

The set of three studies converges on the idea that consumers hold an implicit belief that healthy foods are less filling than unhealthy foods.

The researchers demonstrated that portraying a food as healthy as opposed to unhealthy using a front-of-package nutritional scale affects consumer judgment and behaviour. When a food is portrayed as healthy, as opposed to unhealthy, consumers report lower hunger levels after consumption, order greater portion sizes of the food, and consume greater amounts of the food.

Surprisingly, even consumers who said they disagree with the idea that healthy foods are less filling than unhealthy foods were subject to the same biases. In addition, the researchers introduced a novel tactic for reversing consumers’ habit of overeating foods portrayed as healthy: highlighting the nourishing aspects of healthy food mitigates the belief that it is less filling.

Interestingly, these findings suggest that the recent proliferation of healthy food labels may be ironically contributing to the obesity epidemic rather than reducing it, according to a press release on the study.