“Trans-fat free” equals “healthy”. Or not.

Ever heard of the “health halo”? No, it’s not the glow of smugness you can almost see surrounding joggers in the park. It’s a new way of telling you that you probably don’t know what’s in your food.

The New York Times coined the term to denote the flurry of phrases like “low-calorie”, “trans-fat free” and “low-fat” which don’t necessarily translate to “good for you”.

The lo-fi study found that the label “trans-fat free” caused consumers to underestimate the calorie content of their meal to the tune of almost 200 calories. Following on the heels of New York’s pioneering ban on trans-fats in restaurants, it may help to explain the people out there who are gaining weight even while conscientiously sticking to foods that advertise themselves as healthy.

‘Experiments showed that putting a “low fat” label on food caused everyone, especially overweight people, to underestimate its calories, to eat bigger helpings and to indulge in other foods.

The researchers found that customers at McDonald’s were more accurate at estimating the calories in their meal than were customers at Subway, apparently because of the health halo created by advertisements like one showing that a Subway sandwich had a third the fat of a Big Mac.’

Advertising which works to increase corporate profits by playing on people’s laudable desire to eat well? We’ve never heard of such a thing.

The article suggests that clearer and more readable food-labelling should reverse this trend. We feel it might be more helpful if big business and the media stopped dividing everything that can be eaten by humans into “good” and “bad” foods and lecturing us for indulging in the latter, but whatever.

Silver lining? At least next time you’re in a room with one of those smug, self-congratulatory “healthy” types, you can try asking them about the real calorific contents of their food. It might just knock the halo off their heads.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/science/02tier.html?_r=1