The latest study out of Brian Wansink’s lab, the man who wrote the book “Mindless Eating”, and whose laboratory focuses on the psychology of how we relate to our food, is already going to have something of a halo. Wansink is a specialist in the field and is very well known for many of his studies on nutrition, including my favorite study, the bottomless soup effect, where a constantly refilling bowl of soup will cause people to slurp up 300 calories more, because their eyes fool them as to how much they’ve eaten (he noted the necessity of using tomato soup, as chicken noodle clogged up the refilling mechanism and caused some very unpleasant gurgling noises that caused people to wonder what was going on).
But recently, Wansink’s lab has begun to study the effects of “health halos” on foods, the idea that a particular health attribute of our food can color our entire perception about that food. Previous work has looked, for example, at the “low fat” health halo–the idea that if you’re told a food is low fat, you will believe that the food is healthier than the regular version.
But low fat changes something about the nutritional value of the food. What about if a food has nothing nutritionally different about it, but has a difference in how it is made? Is there an organic “health halo” effect?
You bet there is.
Jenny Wan-chen Lee et al. “You taste what you see: Organic labels favorably bias taste
Perceptions” Cornell University, presented at Experimental Biology, 2011.
To investigate this, Lee et al took 144 people, 55{9f43b4361d9a125bc126dd2a2d1949be02545ec69880430bc4fed2272fd72da3} female, and asked them whether they bought organic food frequently and whether they read nutritional labels frequently. Then, they gave the participants samples of cookies, chips, and yogurt, labeled with either an “organic” label or a “regular” label (in reality all the food was organic). They let the participants eat the food and then asked what the participants thought about it.
It turned out that putting an organic label on a food increased the amount that people were willing to pay for it and increased how healthy they thought the food was. It also caused them to think that the foods contained fewer calories and more fiber. Overall, they found that food labeled organic had a “health halo” around it, causing people to think it was healthier than its conventional counterpart.
What was interesting to me was what influenced these measures of the ‘health halo’. There was no difference due to sex, but there was a difference in the organic health halo measure when you asked people whether they were environmentally conscious or read food labels frequently. The more you purchase organic food, the less susceptible you are to believing that it’s better. Additionally, the MORE you look at nutrition labels, the less you are affected by the organic halo. The authors hypothesize that people who are motivated to look at nutrition labels more often (say, by wanting to lose weight) are more likely to realize that organically-produced food is not, in fact, inherently more nutritious than conventionally-produced food.
What really interested the investigators about the organic health halo was the calorie underestimation aspect. People who eat foods they think are organic actually think that the foods have fewer calories, and we are still trying to figure out why this is. But the other really interesting thing is the TASTE. While yogurt may not have much of a difference, people would RATHER have a cookie they think of as less healthy than one with a health halo surrounding it. When we want to indulge, we don’t want to think about whether it’s good for us or the planet, we just want our dang cookies. Further studies from the lab will investigate the connection between various labels and taste, as well as further looking at the health halo, and what it means for food.
