Nutritional Pearls: Switching to Healthier Snacks
John is a 27-year-old patient who is interested in losing weight by changing his diet. He has recently swapped his carbohydrate- and sugar-laden snacks for healthier, less caloric alternatives.
As the days progress, he continues to snack on his healthy brand-labeled foods. While pretty satisfied with his attempt, he is not losing weight.
What advice can you offer John?
What is the correct answer?
(Answer and discussion on next page)
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Answer: Healthier food doesn’t mean you should eat unlimited quantities.
In 2009, researchers completed a study showing that if people think a cookie is healthy, they’ll eat more of them. As in, a lot more of them—about 35% more on average.1
This healthy “halo effect” isn’t limited to the description of the food, as you might guess. Researchers from The College of William & Mary studied the interaction between brand perception, calorie information, and the individual’s intake of a snack food to conclude that the food’s brand also has an impact.2
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The Research
For the study, 188 undergraduate women (aged 18-26) were selected to “examine taste-perceptions in snack foods popular among college students.” Researchers selected one snack item—the oatmeal chocolate-chip cookie, which was deliberately chosen due to its combination of perceived healthfulness (the oatmeal) and unhealthfulness (the chocolate chips).
Each participant was given 3 of the cookies along with a taste test questionnaire labeled with a snack food brand. They were instructed to eat as many of the cookies as they wished while filling out the questionnaire. The researchers had previously assigned each participant to one of 2 groups: a Kashi or Nabisco group. The reasoning was that Kashi is a brand that is associated with healthier foods, while Nabisco is associated with unhealthy foods. To further this perception, the participants were read a brief script describing each brand in such terms.
The 2 groups were subdivided into 3 categories: one group’s questionnaire included a calorie count per cookie of 130 calories per cookie; a second group’s questionnaire included a calorie count of 260 calories per cookie; and a third group’s questionnaire included no calorie information, just the brand of the cookie.
The Results
- The participants who received the 130-calorie count on their questionnaires rated the taste of the cookies about the same, regardless of which brand the cookie was labeled.
- Those who received the 260-calorie count on their questionnaire, rated their cookies quite differently. Those receiving Kashi cookies rated their cookies as tasting much better than those whose cookies were labeled as Nabisco.
- Those with no calorie information provided rated their cookies in much the same way as those with the 260-calorie count.
- Unsurprisingly, individuals with the 130-calorie counts ate more cookies than those with the 260-calorie counts.
An additional questionnaire measured whether participants were restrained eaters, people who consciously restrain their food intake in order to lose or maintain their weight, or unrestrained eaters, people who aren’t as concerned about restraining their eating.
Restrained eaters ate about the same amount of healthful-branded cookies regardless of the calorie label. On the other hand, restrained eaters ate more of the lower-calorie unhealthful cookie than they did the higher-calorie or no-calorie-labeled unhealthful cookies. In fact, they ate more of the lower-calorie unhealthful cookies than cookies labeled any other way—even the healthy, low-calorie cookies.
Unrestrained eaters, however, ate more of the healthful cookies than the unhealthful cookies regardless of the calorie counts.
The researchers theorize that while unrestrained eaters might have been more concerned about eating healthier cookies (given that they ate more of them), restrained eaters might have mentally justified to themselves eating more of the lower-calorie unhealthful cookies because they were lower calorie.
What’s the “Take Home?”
Remind your patients who are working on their weight that while making healthier choices is an important part of an overall healthy lifestyle, that doesn’t mean that they can eat unlimited amounts of healthy foods. The total number of calories in what they eat matters most.
- Harlan T. Perception matters. Dr Gourmet website. www.drgourmet.com/column/dr/2009/033009.shtml. Accessed August 24, 2014.
- Cavanagh K, Kruja B, Forestell C, et al. The effect of brand and caloric information on flavor perception and food consumption in restrained and unrestrained eaters. Appetite. 2014;82:1-7.