How to Make Healthy Eating More Attractive to Americans

The researchers instructed participants to click on the images that looked more like “the first thing that comes to mind.” The majority of participants chose the better prepared option when it came to unhealthy foods, but generally did the opposite when it came to healthy foods. For example, people imagined hot dogs and nachos (less healthy) as fully prepared, but vegetables and legumes as less prepared or raw.

In another experiment, participants were also quicker to associate healthy with raw and unhealthy with prepared. Importantly, they believed that prepared foods tasted better, regardless of whether the food was healthy or unhealthy, the researchers said.

Participants in India had different perceptions, a finding that Turnwald and Fishbach say reflects cultural differences in the way Indians and Americans eat. The Standard American Diet is notoriously unhealthy. In contrast, “Indian culture has a rich tradition of eating highly prepared plant-based and vegetarian dishes,” they write.

When the researchers ran the experiment again and showed photos of more and less prepared dishes with culturally relevant foods in India, they found a significantly smaller effect. Participants were still more likely to choose prepared foods as unhealthy than healthy, although the margin was significantly narrower than in the United States.

The results suggest that adding descriptions of how the food was prepared – to menus, advertising, signage or other materials – can change people’s perceptions. Turnwald and Fishbach conducted an experiment in which participants were presented with real Cheesecake Factory products, both from the regular and lower-calorie “Skinnylicious” menus. They presented four high-calorie and four low-calorie dishes and changed the description of each dish. For example, participants in one group could order “artichokes,” while participants in another group saw the exact same offering, described as “grilled artichokes served with lemon garlic aioli.” Participants rated each dish based on how appealing it sounded and how likely they were to order it.

The descriptions increased the likelihood that people would find the dishes appetizing. “If you tell people how healthy food is made, they want to get it,” Fishbach says. The finding may offer a simple way to influence healthier food choices.