====================== Comment ================
Evidently, it is common to eat more food and calories in a "healthy
restaurant" -- just because.
Maybe it is like the "Snackwell Effect", because low fat foods were said
to be healthier, people would eat more of them and consume more calories
in the end.
I will sometimes buy a snack because it is "Low Carb" and therefore
healthier.
Surely, others do as well. Good reason to not start "Low Carb" snacks in
the first place? The ones you can conveniently buy in some convenience
stores, at least.
================== End Comment ==========================
Cornell Chronicle Online Search Chronicle Online
Sept. 24, 2007
'Healthy' restaurants help make us fat, says a new study by Cornell's
Brian Wansink
By Susan Lang
If you're like most, you eat worst at healthy restaurants.
The "health halos" of healthy restaurants often prompt consumers to
treat themselves to higher-calorie side dishes, drinks or desserts than
when they eat at fast-food restaurants that make no health claims,
according to a series of new Cornell studies.
The research, published in the October online version of the Journal of
Consumer Research, found that many people also tend to underestimate by
35 percent just how many calories those so-called healthy restaurant
foods contain.
"We found that when people go to restaurants claiming to be healthy,
such as Subway, they choose additional side items containing up to 131
percent more calories than when they go to restaurants like McDonald's,
that don't make this claim," says Brian Wansink, author of "Mindless
Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think" (Bantam 2006) and the John S.
Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics and director of
the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.
Wansink and co-author Pierre Chandon, a marketing professor at INSEAD,
an international business school in France, also report that by simply
asking people to reconsider restaurants' health claims prompts them to
better estimate calories and not to order as many side dishes.
They recommend that public policy efforts help people to better estimate
the number of calories in foods.
"In estimating a 1,000 calorie meal, I've found that people on average
underestimate by 159 calories if the meal was bought at Subway than at
McDonald's," says Wansink. Since it takes an energy imbalance of 3,500
calories to put on one pound, that extra 159 calories could lead to
almost a 5-pound weight gain over a year for people eating at Subway
twice a week compared with choosing a comparable meal at McDonald's with
the same frequency, he says.
These studies, he says, help explain why lower-calorie menus at
fast-food restaurants have not led to the expected reduction in total
calorie intake and in obesity rates.