Healthy toppings still add to waistline
You’ve just been served a large slice of chocolate cake — the kind so unapologetically decadent, you feel your thighs expand just looking at it. Thankfully, though, this particular cake is topped with fresh fruit, which reduces the calorie content and makes it a healthier choice.
Absurd, right? A new Canadian study, however, shows that’s exactly how we’re approaching eating: thinking a bad food choice can be cancelled by a good one. In fact, researchers find that people reduce their calorie estimation of an unhealthy indulgence by 16 to 25 per cent when it’s topped with something healthy.
“The common understanding … is that consumers may overlook the calories in toppings, as toppings are usually small in quantity; our research shows that this may not always be the case,” said study co-author Ying Jiang, of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. “Due to consumers’ motivation to justify the consumption of unhealthy food, they may unknowingly treat healthy toppings as containing negative calories.”
The Journal of Consumer Psy- chology study, which draws on experiments with more than 650 people, found that when an unhealthy base (cake, ice cream) was topped with something healthy (such as fresh fruit), people significantly underestimated the combined calories. By contrast, starting with a healthy base (salad, frozen yogurt) made people much more attuned to total calories, regardless of whether the topping was healthy.
Adding a healthy topping to an unhealthy base also augmented people’s perceived healthiness of the food, and increased the amount they ate. These findings add to a growing body of literature on so-called “health halos.”
In 2006, Cornell University researchers found that when people were served candies labelled “low-fat M&M’s,” they consumed 28 per cent more, on average, than when served candies labelled “regular M&M’s.” The following year, that same team found people who ate at a sandwich chain versus a fast-food chain (the former being perceived as healthier than the latter) were likelier to underestimate their intake, and tended to order additional drinks, desserts and sides if they considered their entree to be wholesome.
And in the most striking example, a 2009 study revealed that the mere inclusion of a healthy item on a menu not only increased the likelihood of people ordering an indulgent choice but also made them feel as though they were living healthfully — a phenomenon dubbed “vicarious goal fulfilment.”
Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, a Canadian obesity expert, said the process behind these health halos tends to be unconscious.
“I don’t even know if people are able to mentally protect themselves against this,” said Freedhoff, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa. “People make over 200 dietary decisions a day. That’s a lot of mental energy if you have to question every one of them.
“Our lizard brains are not particularly good at making thoughtful dietary choices,” said Freedhoff. “As a species, we enjoy taking pleasure from food. So we convince ourselves that it’s OK to do so — and especially OK to do more so.”