New study suggests that the calorie count for different food options on the restaurant menu have a little effect on consumer behavior and may help combat obesity, reports a new study. The findings of the study are published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Customers at chain restaurants throughout the United States will start to see more menus that list calorie counts for different food options on the list, but will this motivate people to order healthier items?
‘Calorie labeling policy should not be regarded as a failure as it could become a potent tool in combating obesity epidemic by a simple intervention of mentioning calorie information on menus first.’
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The new information on menus is the result of an Affordable Care Act rule that was formally implemented on May 7, 2018, in an effort to tackle the country's obesity epidemic. Read More..
Researchers have been studying the answer to this question in early-adopter states that rolled out the policy before 2018, but the results suggested that the calorie counts had little effect on consumer behavior.
Rather than concluding that Americans are unwilling to opt for lower calorie items, behavioral scientists hypothesized that the location of the calorie information to the right of the food item's name could explain the ineffectiveness of the calorie labeling legislation.
"There is a lot of research showing that the first piece of information people see seems to be given greater weight as they process details, and we wondered if this could have implications for the calorie counts on menus," says Steven Dallas, Ph.D., who conducted the studies at New York University.
To test the hypothesis, the researchers initiated an experiment at a casual chain restaurant in which they asked customers waiting in line to order from a paper copy of the restaurant's menu.
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"We were surprised to find such a significant difference between the groups," Dallas says. One explanation for this finding may be a cognitive pattern called predecisional distortion in which people draw initial conclusions and then view subsequent information through that lens, Dallas says. If consumers initially read calorie information that leads them to believe an item is unhealthy, then they may process the following information about that option with the same negative bias.
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"What this paper show is that a trivially simple intervention could increase the power of the calorie information on menus," Dallas says. "The calorie labeling policy should not necessarily be deemed a failure and could become a powerful tool in combating the obesity epidemic."
Source-Eurekalert