A wake-up call for anyone who thinks posting calories will be the silver bullet that changes eating habits

Based on the scientific literature, we know that people who seek out and use calorie information are likely to be different from other eaters in many ways, including their motivation to cut calories. Sure, it’s possible that some people who looked at the information were persuaded to consume fewer calories, but it is equally plausible that those who were intending to order lower-calorie meals were more likely to seek out the calorie information.

By helping consumers make more informed decisions, calorie posting may be desirable even if it fails to reduce calorie intake. But effective policies to deal with obesity will need to involve much more than posting calories. People eat too much because calorie-dense foods are convenient and cheap, with large portion sizes priced to encourage overeating.

That’s Julie S. Downs, George Loewenstein, and Jessica Wisdom on the effectiveness of calorie posting nudges.

Wharton’s Kevin Volpp thinks a revised menu design might be a better nudge.

Incentivizing convenience of ordering low calorie food, by clustering these options together at the top of the menu, seems to have a significant impact. This indicates that traditional measures of informational provision are not always sufficient to motivate changes in unhealthy behavior.

What if you told your kids how much they like eating vegetables?

Cognitive Daily points to an interesting new study with a strategy not recommended for parents interested in getting their kids to eat more greens. In grand psychology fashion, this experiment involves some serious manipulation. Participants were lied to about their actual preferences. Ahem, in the words of the study, the authors “planted the suggestion that subjects loved to eat asparagus as children.” (No pun appears to be intended with the verb choice “plant.”) These “new (false) beliefs” had an immediate effect for many, including “increased general liking of asparagus, greater desire to eat asparagus in a restaurant setting, and a willingness to pay more for asparagus in the grocery store.” But beware the unintended consequences when you tell your teenager why she loves asparagus so much.

Dave Munger sums up the experiment and the key result below:

Participants were told they’d be taking a survey about food preferences and personality. First, everyone was asked about their “food history,” with 24 questions about particular foods — all these questions except one were only there to distract from the key question, which asked them to rate how likely it was that they “loved asparagus the first time they tried it” on a scale of 1 to 8.

After taking a couple of other questionnaires, again, to distract from the primary goal of the study, they were asked how likely they were to order each of 32 dishes from a hypothetical restaurant menu, again on a scale of 1 to 8. Again, asparagus was one of the dishes.

One week later, all the students were brought back and given a phony analysis of their responses to the previous week’s survey. Here’s the key to the study: as part of this analysis, half the students were told that their responses indicated they “loved to eat cooked asparagus” as a young child, while the other half were not told anything about asparagus.

Then everyone was given the original two food preference questionnaires again (one about how much they liked foods during childhood, and another about what items they were likely to order in a restaurant today). Here are their ratings for the “loved asparagus the first time you tried it” question:

A full version of the paper is here.

Why would an ice cream freezer lid ever be left open?

Because it’s easier to get the ice cream, of course. From Brian Wansink’s Food Think:

One cafeteria tested (how much effort people will go to to eat ice cream) by leaving the lid of an ice cream cooler closed on some days and open on other days. The ice cream cooler was in the exact same location, and people could always see the ice cream.  All that varied was whether they had to go through the effort of opening the lid in order to get it.  Even that was too much work for many people.  If the lid was closed, only 14% of the diners decided it was worth the modest effort to open it.  If the lid was open, 30% decided it was ice cream time.

Some readers may wonder why a store owner would ever leave the lid on an ice cream freezer open? Would the extra cost of the energy (not to mention the general environmental unfriendliness of such a strategy) be worth the extra ice cream sales? Maybe not for a typical freezer. But Wansink says there are some in Europe that keep ice cream frozen from the bottom, allowing owners to lose the lid. Any readers seen or shopped at these freezers before?

Hat tip: Tom Vanderbilt.

Want people to lose weight? Put a mirror in front of the donuts.

Richard Thaler appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America last week. As part of the package, the correspondent ran an unscientific experiment of the breakfast buffet table at a local office, tweaking the presentation of the food to see the effects on eating habits. Elevating fruit on display platters is a good idea. Putting mirrors in front of the donuts works even better. The clip, which lasts about 5 minutes, is here.

The Nudge cafeteria part II

Cornell has launched a new web site, smarterlunchrooms.org, for school lunch administrators and managers that may put us one step closer to a world of nudge cafeterias. David Just, a professor at Cornell’s Department of Applied Economics and Management explains the idea to US News:

Rather than advocating outright bans of certain foods, its goal is to “design sustainable lunchrooms that guide smarter choices.” The key word there is “guide.” Simply replacing pizza with whole-wheat flatbreads and fries with roasted sweet potatoes doesn’t allow kids to learn how to make real-world choices, says David Just…”We set it up so that everything is available and the kids are enabled to see how to make decisions,” he says. Making those decisions, he says, leads to good habits.

Among the ideas are 1) Separate cash only lanes for desserts and soft drinks; 2) Renaming vegetables (think “X-ray Vision Carrots”) or simply describing healthy foods in richer detail (think “rich vegetable medley soup” instead of “vegetable soup.” Anyone who does not appreciate the power of naming probably doesn’t eat out much. However, not all names appear to be effective. For example, calling an item “Food of the Day” doesn’t spark much of an appetite; 3) Shrinking the size of plates in the a la carte line in order to make food portions look larger, and therefore a better value.

For a related article with a headline we love, check out “When Nudging in the Lunch Line Might be a Good Thing,” in this month’s Amber Waves from the USDA. Among the more interesting observations is the long length of time (relatively speaking) that students spend in line at lunch cafeteria: 5 minutes out of a 30-minute lunch period. A long time in check-out line can expose one to more temptations , very few of which are probably going to be healthy.

What would the Nudge cafeteria look like?

Some readers who have liked the cafeteria metaphor at the beginning of Nudge, have wondered what an actual Nudge cafeteria would look like. Here are a few possibilities:

1) Tables for two. People tend to eat more in groups than when they are alone because they mimic the eating habits of others. But there is some evidence that the amount of food someone consumes is a linear function of the number of people sitting with them.

2) A discount for calling in your order from upstairs (or wherever your office happens to be). Calling in your order serves as a commitment strategy for eating healthy, rather than being tempted by the french fries or the cookies as you try to find the salad bar. The discount would simply be added as a traditional incentive to entice more people to take advantage of it. To limit impulse checkout purchases, pick-up would probably have to be at a separate window.

3) Brighter lights. Environmental factors of all kinds like noise, smells, temperature, and lighting are known to affect food consumption. Brighter lights limits limit the length of time people spend at a meal, but they are superior (in terms of discomfort) to alternatives like foul odors or loud music. People might be more likely to take their food back to their desk, which might even increase their daily productivity.

4) Keep the popular desserts, lose the unpopular ones. One of behavioral economists’ favorite violations of classical economic theory is how a choice between A and B if affected by the introduction of alternative C. Classical economists say C, whether it is there or not, shouldn’t matter when someone chooses between A and B. This frequently seems not to be the case. The more enticing unhealthy alternatives there are at the dessert bar competing with hot and cold lunch items, the lower the value of the salad compared to the burger, thus making the healthy decision less likely. So as not to incite too many charges of heavy-handed paternalism, only the least popular desserts would be removed from the menu. It is hard to know whether the unpopular items were flatly unappetizing or just unappetizing compared to other desserts. To help find out, dessert policy would be open to continuous revision through good feedback loops.

About those 100 calorie snack packs…

A pair of new marketing studies in the Journal of Consumer Research says they nudge people to eat more. Previously, consumer behavior research has found that people eat more when a large portion is put in front of them.

But one of the new studies, led by Rita Coelho do Vale at the Technical University of Lisbon, found people believe smaller packages help them “regulate hedonic, tempting consumption,” but in fact their consumption can actually increase. Large packages, on the other hand, trigger concern about overeating.

The participants watched episodes of “Friends” and were told the study was about evaluating ads. Bags of potato chips — of differing sizes, of course — were slipped into the test.

The result: Smaller packages are more likely to fuel temptation. “Because they are considered to be innocent pleasures, [small packages] may turn out to be sneaky small sins,” the researchers conclude.

The other study, by three Arizona State researchers, looked directly at those 100 calorie “mini-packs.” The worst overeating is among chronic dieters.

The researchers believe their research shows that the ubiquitous small packages may actually undermine dieters’ attempts to limit calories. “On the one hand, consumers perceive the mini-packs to be a generous portion of food (numerous small food morsels in each pack and multiple mini-packs in each box); on the other hand, consumers perceive the mini-packs to be diet food. For chronic dieters, this perceptual dilemma causes a tendency to overeat, due to their emotion-laden relationship with food.”

In a series of studies, the researchers assessed peoples’ perceptions of M&Ms in mini-packs versus regular-sized packages. They found that participants tended to have conflicting thoughts about the mini-packs: They thought of them as “diet food,” yet they overestimated how many calories the packages contained. In subsequent studies, the researchers assessed participants’ relationship with food, dividing them into “restrained” and “unrestrained” eaters. The “restrained” eaters tended to consume more calories from mini-packs than “unrestrained” participants.

The same issue of the Journal also includes a study on fast food choice architecture, in which restaurants have eliminated the smallest soda sizes in response to customers who pick the middle size. Starbucks already knows this lesson.

Can grocery delivery be greener than walking to a store yourself?

Food conservation is a national issue in the U.K., with its own awareness week and a prime minister who wants to end buy-one-get-one-free marketing. Ocado, the grocery delivery company that gave customers the option of scheduling a delivery when a van is already planning to be in the neighborhood, has another nudge for eliminating some of the waste that analysts say would feed 19 million people.

According to a press release, Ocado’s research into the reasons behind food waste indicates that “forgetting to check when a product needs to be used by” is the third most common reason for wasting food (“cooking too much” is the top reason). Along with every delivery, the company is now printing up a new receipt that lists all fresh foods – from single ingredients to prepared meals – by best before dates.

Ocado says having your groceries delivered by its vans produces a lower carbon footprint than if you walked to the store and bought them yourself. How is that possible? In part, by building warehouses that are much greener than traditional stores and sending groceries out in bio diesel trucks.

Portion control in 68 words

Next time you sit down to dinner, dim the lights – but not too much. Both bright light and dim light may make you eat more. Watch the background music, too. If it’s too fast, you’ll eat fast, and therefore more; too slow and you’ll keep eating. And think small for plates – a portion that looks skimpy on a dinner plate looks ample on a salad plate.

From the Boston Globe.