Can Packaging Give Your Food a Health Halo?
We all try our best to eat healthy and buy nutritious food for our families. But the amount of information, misinformation and just plain marketing speak we’re hit with every trip to the grocery store can make goal hard to achieve. “Many foods contain front of package nutrient claims that make you think you are eating a healthy food,” says Alissa Rumsey M.S., R.D., author of Three Steps to a Healthier You . “This so-called ‘health halo’ often causes people to overeat foods they think are healthy.” A recent study, published in the Journal of Business Research , supports this theory. Researchers presented two different foods (a cookie and a granola bite) in two different packaging options (an unportioned bag or a bag that contained several individually packaged single-serving packs) to a group of 171 students. What they found is that the granola bites had a powerful health halo that that cookies did not — and that affected how much the students ate. So when faced with a full, unpor