Restaurant menus everywhere feature dishes with dazzling names that are as eye-catching as they are mouth-watering. However, these seemingly innocent labels mislead people, causing them to consume unhealthy dishes which cause weight gain and obesity. This amazing yet alarming phenomenon has been proven in a recent study conducted on food psychology at Stanford University.
The founder of the Bariatric Lab Center for Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Professor Halil Coşkun provided information about the details of the study, saying: "Despite how tempting it may be to stress that vegetables are healthy, it may actually result in a kickback. According to the study conducted at Stanford, some of the dishes examined in the study had been labelled with names that presented them as being more nutritional than they actually are. Meanwhile, other dishes that were labelled "low fat, low sodium" or "sugar free" were labelled accurately - although participants were unaware of this fact. The study revealed that the average person does not prefer dishes that are labelled as "healthy."
In fact, healthy dishes were proven to be widely perceived as less delicious among people while participants preferred to consume larger portions of dishes labelled with fancy descriptions. Professor Coşkun also noted that "Of the 28,000 persons who participated in the study, one-third consumed vegetable dishes throughout the duration of the 46-day experiment. The number of people who selected dishes with fancy names exceeded the number of those who did not."