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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Yiddish literature includes numerous stories about the mythical village of Chelm, filled with people who, well, let’s put it this way: they are not likely to graduate first in their Yeshiva class. One such tale involves befuddled carpenters who could not figure out why, no matter how many times they cut additional pieces off the ends of a board, it was still too short. Oy.
Now new research shows that when it comes to food, most people are honorary citizens of Chelm. Investigator Alexander Chernev, for one, has discovered that many people believe they can cut a meal’s calorie count by an ingenious method—adding more food! Oy.
Chernev, who investigates consumer behavior at Northwestern University’s Kellogg (snap, crackle, pop) School of Management, spends an inordinate amount of time around hamburgers for a guy who’s not managing a McDonald’s. Publishing in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, he explains that people act as if healthful foods have “halos”—their healthfulness extends to the rest of the meal. Vegetables and fruit: big halos. Angel food cake: no halo. Go figure.
Here is where the mind applies cockamamie calculus to meals. Eaters consider a food’s healthfulness to be related to how “fattening” it is. “Because healthier meals are perceived to be less likely to promote weight gain,” Chernev writes, “people erroneously assume that adding a healthy item to a meal decreases its potential to promote weight gain.” More is less, more or less.
He had more than 900 subjects look at four different meals and estimate their calorie contents. The meals were a hamburger, a bacon-and-cheese waffle sandwich, chili with beef and a meatball-pepperoni cheesesteak—none of which are going to win any prizes from the American Heart Association, and all of which sound really good right now.
(I just remembered there’s leftover pizza in the fridge. Back in a mo.)
Where were we? Right, bad foods, bad. Half of the participants were also shown an obviously healthful side dish, such as three sticks of celery. Of course, the only real reason for anyone to want three celery sticks is to make an “A” that Hester Prynne could have worn on the planet Krypton or to do a surprisingly good impression of a walrus leading an orchestra. But I digress while I digest.
The subjects who saw only the main meal guessed it had, on average, 691 calories. Subjects who saw the same meal served with the perfunctory celery sticks or other healthful window dressings guessed that the entire meal had just 648 calories. That’s 43 fewer calories, which a really imaginative person could then add to the burger-and-celery-meal with, say, a cookie to get the calorie count back up to the burger by itself.
This kind of fatatouille reasoning was on display in a study that Cornell University’s Brian Wansink, a leader in eating-behavior research, presented at the Association for Consumer Research conference this past October. He found that people who ate at restaurants that claimed to be healthy estimated a meal’s calorie count to be only 56 percent of its true number. Individuals making this big error then compounded it by figuring their assumed low-cal meal made it okay to have more of the bad stuff, such as fries or cookies. That kind of logic will go straight to your hips.
Back to Chernev. His truly devilish discovery, which he dubs the “dieter’s paradox,” is that the strength of the belief about adding good foods to fight bad ones correlates with concern over putting on pounds: the people who worry most about their weight thought that, on average, the burger-plus-veggie combo had 96 fewer calories than the burger alone. The folks who were not anxious about adipose still fell for the halo-induced paradox, but they thought the veggies cut only 26 calories off the meal.
For public health advocates, the takeout or, rather, take-home message is that merely promoting the consumption of healthful foods may actually be calorie counterproductive. Because an apple a day keeps the paradox in play.
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12 Comments
Add CommentFunny because celery actually costs more calories to metabolize than it contains, so eating celery actually would cut down on the total calorie count of the meal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKind of a big oversight on the part of the researcher! Besides, is the study true with any food perceived as healthy? Or just with celery?
Celery has net negative calories, so adding it to any meal reduces the overall caloric intake. It also makes your semen taste better (or so I've been told).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes I went there.
I hope you mean a green letter "Z" and the Planet Htrae, better known as the Bizarro world.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's odd to think that while I hold alternate views about many of Scientific American’s articles, it’s a literary reference I feel should be commented on.
Just for fun, try looking down a particles path from 2050 to 1840.
Celery? Negative calorie? You must be kidding your self. Yes, you may burn a net of 5 calories chewing on the celery sticks, but the author reports a perceived reduction of up to 96 calories! We are still talking about a 90 calorie self deception.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBeing 10% overweight myself, I concur with the author. Wait, make that 15%.
Celery doesn't have negative calories. There's no such thing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou may burn more calories because it takes effort to chew and digest it, but that doesn't mean that celery has negative calories. If that were the case, calories would be calculated on a case-to-case basis, since some people chew more than others.
For example, if a hamburger is on top of a mountain, it doesn't mean that hamburger has -700 calories (300 for hamburger and -1000 to climb the mountain to reach it).
Don't eat celery with a hamburger . Eat celery without a hamburger . Get protein from lower calorie protein foods .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSteve Mirsky makes the same mistake that A. Chernev does. People asked to estimate the calories of a meal that they know is better for them vrs. the same meal without a low calorie component will assign a lower number to the 'better' meal if that is the only answer that they are allowed to give. They may not even realize that they intuitively know that eating 3 large sticks of celery (a perfect example) with a burger will prevent them from getting a milkshake to go, or finishing off the half box of cookies left in the car on the way home; the healthy item does decrease the meal's "potential to promote weight gain."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA similar situation is forced when a defense attorney asks a witness how they knew the alleged killer was a woman... knowing that most people will answer hair length, lipstick or clothing, when experts know it is shoulder to hip ratio, subcutaneous fat, etc. Surveys are rife with multiple choise answers selected to force a desired answer.
The error in regards to a restaurant claiming to be healthy is just due to intentional deceptive advertising. You can get a whole platefull of tasty food under 500 calories; many restaurants print the caloric content on the menu.
Jesse Ritz
Birdsboro, PA
Mirsky lands a bulls eye identifying healthy marketing as the perception vs. actual calories consumed. The reason why the mind is a terrible thing to one waist is the lack of understanding how much energy is in a calorie. We observe labels, zero in on fat but ignore the overall caloric number. Being omnivores, bodies don't care where the calories come from...fat protein, or a carb, it willing takes on the party of three regardless.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real culprit to our waist is not using our minds to understand the energy equivalent of calories consumed. Legislation puts calories on a package but folk fail to relate how much energy is available vs. what a body needs. We don't overfill our vehicle fuel tank, yet we continually use the "halo induced" mind to overfill our stomachs.
the mistake those researchers, and others, are making, is in assuming this error in computation makes any difference what so ever on how much people eat. In most cases it won't. Future hunger / appetite would reflect what they actually ate, not what they think they ate, and their food choice would follow their hunger / appetite.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe food industry has made its fortune on this kind of cognitive dissonance. Cure cancer? Eat more of something! Urinary tract infections? Drink more of something! Pork? It's the other white meat...even though it's 30+% fat. Childhood obesity? Eat more soy protein! Never mind that it's simple calorie arithmetic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeldom is there advice to consume less of anything - research sponsors and advertisers that support press articles seldom pay for that.
Steve, the next time you talk about some "mythical" village of Chelm where everyone's a moron, you might want to try Wikipedia or Google earth. There's nothing mythical about Chelm, except for the poor opinion Jews seem to have of the people of Chelm. It's a real place, and your comment comes off as a bit prejudiced because of it.
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