1. Foods Labelled “Healthy”
In such a crowded marketplace, where we have food choices quite literally at our fingertips and supermarkets open 24 hours a day, food manufacturers need clever ways of making us choose their products. They spend millions on quirky marketing campaigns to catch our eye.
With so many of us now making considered, health conscious choices, one of the most common marketing gimmicks is to label a food “healthy’. This might not even be by using the word healthy, instead brands might use words such as wholesome or natural. Or they might use no words at all and instead use images of rolling fields, sunshine and happy, smiling people in gym gear.
But what this does, research shows, is make us eat more of it, than we would something that we considered unhealthy. What’s more, research shows that we subconsciously tend to feel less full afterwards because we’ve evolved to somehow associate unhealthy foods with feeling full.
Researchers are as yet unclear why we think like this. But by all means, eat all the healthy food, and eat larger portions as long as you’re not overdoing it with the calorie intake. Just when you feel hungry soon afterwards, remind yourself that this could be your brain playing tricks on you and you’re not actually hungry after all.
