Eating healthy or feeling empty?
Medical Xpress | 28 December 2015
Eating too much is typically considered one of the prime culprits of obesity. A new study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, looked specifically at overconsumption of “healthy” foods which consumers often perceive as less filling. The researchers successfully found evidence to support their hypothesis that when people eat what they consider to be healthy food, they eat more than the recommended serving size because they associate “healthy” with less filling.
The research utilizes a multi-method approach to investigate the “healthy = less filling” intuition. The first study was conducted with 50 undergraduate students at a large public university and employed the well-established Implicit Association Test to provide evidence for an inverse relationship between the concepts of healthy and filling. The second study was a field study conducted with 40 graduate students at a large public university and measured participants’ hunger levels after consuming a cookie that is either portrayed as healthy or unhealthy to test the effect of health portrayals on experienced hunger levels. The third study was conducted with 72 undergraduate students in a realistic scenario to measure the impact of health portrayals on the amount of food ordered before watching a short film and the actual amount of food consumed during the film. The set of three studies converges on the idea that consumers hold an implicit belief that healthy foods are less filling than unhealthy foods.
