The power of description

Years ago one of our team was doing a cooking demonstration on "UKTV - Good Food Live." The recipe was our Caesar Salad dressing, and when the presenter tasted it - "The moment of truth," she said - she literally stopped and stared at the camera, visibly stunned. "I thought it was going to be awful," she said. "That's lovely!"

People are still surprised when they taste our recipes and find out they're actually good - they still expect that anything that's supposed to be good for you just isn't going to taste good. Chefs and restaurateurs know that labeling a dish "healthy" is the kiss of death: very few people will order it.

A fascinating research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week may help explain why - and how we can combat that perception that healthy food can't taste good.

The authors, researchers at Stanford, worked with the food service staff at the university to test different labels for the same vegetable dish. Each weekday of the academic quarter the authors chose one featured vegetable dish and randomly labeled it in one of four ways: basic (e.g. "carrots"), healthy restrictive ("carrots with sugar-free citrus dressing"), healthy positive ("smart-choice vitamin C citrus carrots"), and indulgent ("twisted citrus-glazed carrots").

Research assistants monitored those who ate in the dining hall and recorded how many people chose the featured vegetable and how much of it they purchased.

Unsurprisingly, the indulgent description induced people to choose the vegetable 25% more often - and purchase 23% more - than when the vegetable was labeled with the basic description. Compared to the "healthy restrictive" description, people chose the indulgently-labeled vegetable 41% more often, and 35% more often than when the label was "healthy positive."

What this means for you

The authors suggest that highlighting the health effects of foods in order to get people to choose the healthier options may be backfiring. Instead, they say, healthy foods should be described in menus and labels in the same way that other, less-healthy foods are described. While you may not own a restaurant, you can certainly make use of this at home, especially with kids: don't tell people the food is healthy - just serve great food that happens to be great for you.

First posted: June 14, 2017