LOOKING FOR HEALTH FOOD? LOOK BEYOND THE PACKAGE
It’s buyer beware in the grocery store, where spiffy labels can be deceiving
If you work hard in the gym to improve your fitness, it makes sense to choose food that complements your healthy regime.
A quick look at the shelves of your local supermarket will show there are plenty of products appealing to your desire for better health and fitness. But it’s buyer beware when it comes to choosing ones with words like “fit,” “health” or “active” attached to their name.
These appeals to consumers aren’t just directed at fitness fanatics, but at anyone who thinks food marketed with a promise of improved health can help reduce a caloric load and drop unwanted pounds.
Products like vitamin water, sports drinks, smoothies and protein bars are obvious in their appeal to the fitness crowd. More subtle is the marketing of certain cereals, granola, breakfast bars, yogurts, crackers and other snacks as healthy choices for anyone looking to lose weight. Then there are terms like “gluten free,” “grain fed,” “organic,” “probiotics,” “local” and “all natural” that are used by food marketers to associate their products with fitness and health.
How effective is selling products under a health or fitness halo? A study published in the Journal of Marketing Research not only suggests such branding is successful, but that it can change consumer behaviour — and not always for the better.
The researchers looked at the impact of fitness branding on consumers trying to lose weight. They recruited 150 weightconscious men and women who were told they were evaluating a new trail mix. Half of the mix was branded with the word “fitness” and included an image of a running shoe. The other half was labelled as trail mix but with no fitness-related images, packaging or text. The study subjects were given eight minutes to taste and rate the product, with instructions to pretend they were at home eating an afternoon snack. In another phase of the study, the subjects were asked to exercise after snacking.
Results indicated that the fitness-branded trail mix was more popular than the plainly labelled snack. And those who performed the exercise component of the study after eating the fitness-branded snack exercised less than those who ate the unbranded trail mix.
“Fitness food may put restrained eaters in double jeopardy,” wrote study author Hans Baumgartner of Pennsylvania State University and co-author Joerg Koenigstorfer of Technische Universität München in Munich. “It makes them eat more and exercise less.”
This isn’t the first study to suggest that putting a health or fitness halo on food results in more consumption than with similar foods that don’t promise health benefits. How many of you have helped yourself to another scoop of low-fat yogurt thinking that it’s better for your waistline than the full-fat options? Yet there’s a significant amount of research suggesting that people who consume full-fat milk, yogurt and butter are no heftier than those who choose the low-fat versions.
Just because a food is low in a less desirable nutrient doesn’t mean it isn’t high in another. Low-fat cookies are often loaded with sugar. And many products that are branded as all-natural are filled with sweeteners that pack a caloric punch, even if they are from “natural” or “wholesome” sources.
What’s also worrisome about the power of this branding is how it affected the level of physical activity among the study subjects who consumed the “fitness” trail mix. The study’s authors felt the snackers justified their inactivity based on their healthy food choice, rationalizing that it was an appropriate substitute for a dose of exercise.
It’s troubling that weightconscious individuals seem to be particularly susceptible to this type of marketing, though those who are nutritionally aware can also be swayed by a savvy marketing pitch. These claims feed the desire to find fitness in a bottle, pill or food, and the hope that something as easy, and pleasurable, as eating can be done in place of sweating it out.
The lesson learned from this study is that the most important information about food isn’t on the front of the package. Instead, take a look at the nutritional label on the back. And while there’s truth to the complaint that those labels are hard to decipher, it’s relatively easy for anyone trying to cut back on calories or sweeteners to see how one product compares to another.
It’s also worth noting that good nutrition doesn’t need a hypedup marketing strategy. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, whole grains and healthy proteins and fats that combine to provide the necessary vitamins and minerals. Reduce the number of processed foods and calorie-dense sweets and snacks, and don’t get drawn in by marketing that focuses on a single claim of improved health. And most important of all, remember that healthy eating habits aren’t a substitute for regular exercise.