Faculty News
Unhealthy Food Equals Tasty Food?
Unhealthy Food Equals Tasty Food?
People Seem to Think So, Study Shows
As obesity grows at an unprecedented rate in the United States and around the world, is it helpful to know why people actually make the food choices they do? A Moore School of Business researcher and two colleagues from Texas thought so, and their recently published study provides an interesting twist.
It’s not just that people exercise too little or don’t have access to healthy foods like fish, poultry, and vegetables, says the article by Dr. Rebecca Walker Naylor, assistant professor of marketing, and coauthors Rajagopal Raghunathan and Wayne D. Hoyer of the University of Texas at Austin. It’s also that consumers intuitively (and apparently unconsciously) believe that the unhealthier the food, the tastier it is and vice versa, according to the study, published in the October 2006 issue of the Journal of Marketing.
Moreover, many of the consumers in the study made their food choices based on this “unhealthy equals tasty” intuition, even though they explicitly told the researchers they didn’t believe that unhealthy foods were tastier than healthy foods.
“I was especially surprised that we got this effect, even from people who said they didn’t believe in the ‘unhealthy equals tasty’ intuition,” said Naylor, 28, who earned her Ph.D. earlier this year at the University of Texas. That unhealthy equals tasty “seems to be a deep-seated belief,” even among well-educated people, Naylor said. Some of the consumers tested in the study held doctorates, while the rest were mostly college graduates or college students.
For one of the experiments, people ate the exact same food – including a drink from India called Mango Lassi. But half were told that Mango Lassi was an unhealthy snack, while the other half were told it was a healthy snack. The people who were told it was unhealthy liked and enjoyed the snack more than those where were told it was a healthy snack.
The results of the study were “somewhat discouraging,” said Naylor, because it would be difficult to change the unhealthier-the-food, the tastier-it-is intuition of most people, particularly since it seems to be a subconscious perception. Still, she said, if the study points out to people what is really going on in their minds, it might affect how they choose which foods to eat.
What can be done, however, about consumers’ “unhealthy equals tasty” intuition? The authors suggest revamped packaging (i.e., having manufacturers more clearly indicate serving size information for unhealthy foods), changing unhealthy foods to make them less unhealthy but still tasty, and providing consumers with better information about what constitutes “healthy.”
It will be a challenge for marketers, however, because if they know that “once people hear the word ‘healthy,’ they’re going to assume it doesn’t taste good,” said Naylor, “then how do you pitch it?”
Naylor and her colleagues call their study a type of “transformative consumer research,” i.e., academic research that contributes to the collective and personal well-being of consumers. The project started off looking at a more general intuition that people in the United States have, based on the “Protestant work ethic that…anything that is fun or enjoyable or tasty is automatically bad for us,” Naylor said. But, ultimately, she and her colleagues decided to focus on exactly what determines the foods we choose, because, Naylor said, “it’s something that a lot of people can relate to, something we all struggle with -- worrying about our weight, trying to figure out how to eat healthy."
Jan Collins
Dec. 4, 2006