How Fast-Food Salads Make You Fat

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Matt Yglesias notes a new study showing that the mere presence of a salad on a fast-food menu actually makes it more likely that customers will indulge in unhealthy items, like french fries.

The full study is behind a pay wall, but here’s the abstract:

This research examines how consumers’ food choices differ when healthy items are included in a choice set compared with when they are not available. Results demonstrate that individuals are, ironically, more likely to make indulgent food choices when a healthy item is available compared to when it is not available. The influence of the healthy item on indulgent choice is stronger for those with higher levels of self‐control. Support is found for a goal‐activation‐based explanation for these findings, whereby the mere presence of the healthy food option vicariously fulfills nutrition‐related goals and provides consumers with a license to indulge.

Yglesias is unimpressed with the explanation, offered by one of the researchers in the New York Times:

“When you consider the healthy option, you say, well, I could have that option,” said Keith Wilcox, a doctoral candidate at Baruch College who is one of the paper’s four authors. “That lowers your guard, leading to self-indulgent behavior.”

The idea, basically, as put on the Food Politics blog, is that the salad creates a “health aura” effect, as when food companies add omega-3s to any random, not-particularly-healthy thing — because people have heard omega-3s are healthy (though they don’t make the foods in question any healthier).

While I’m not sure if the idea of a “health aura” exists outside of this particular paper (Google didn’t turn up anything relevant), it doesn’t sound all that different from the halo effect, where we mistake one aspect of something for all aspects of it. She’s pretty, so she must also be smart; he’s short, so he must also be weak. So, here it would be: the salad is healthy, other things sold here must be healthy.

These aren’t really conscious thought processes. But they happen in the brain pretty regularly. So, it’s not a huge surprise to see them having an effect in fast-food restaurants.

I wonder: Did fast-food chains figure this out before adding the salads, or did they just add the salads to look like they cared about health and then get lucky?

A pretty big win-win for them, either way.