The Health Halo effect

I came across this interesting article describing the health halo effect, and the author is suggesting that this effect is part of the reason for the American Paradox (being, that we Americans are paying more and more attention to nutrition and healthy eating but still getting fatter; it's a sad counterpart to the French Paradox, where the French seemingly eat butter, wine, and chocolate all day long and still fit into their skinny jeans).

They did an experiment in New York, where they showed a picture of a restaurant entree to people and asked them to estimate the calories. Then, they went to another group and showed them the same entree, but added a side of crackers that were labeled "trans fat free!". This group thought that the meal had LESS calories, presumably because of the suggestion of healthy given by those crackers.

In another experiment, researchers found that people eating Subway meals were more likely to underestimate how many calories were in a meal AND were more likely to add on calories in the form of regular soda or cookies, than people eating McDonald's. As one expert put it, “People who eat at McDonald’s know their sins, but people at Subway think that a 1,000-calorie sandwich has only 500 calories".

I really like the end of this article, in which the expert breaks this down into our (American's) unhealthy obsession with healthy food: “Europeans obsess less about nutrition but know what a reasonable portion size is and when they have had too much food, so they’re not as biased by food and diet fads and are healthier. Too many Americans believe that to lose weight, what you eat matters more than how much you eat. It’s the country where people are the best informed about food and enjoy it the least."

Just another example of the diet mentality at work - the health halo.