Studies investigate why attractive foods look healthier to consumers

Review by Emily Henderson, Bachelor of ScienceNovember 9, 2020

Researchers at the University of Southern California Marketing journal It investigates whether attractive foods look healthier to consumers.

Scheduled research in Marketing journal Written by Linda Hagen, entitled “Fairly Healthy Foods: How and When to Improve Perceived Health in Aesthetics”.

Consumers see about 7,000 food and restaurant advertisements annually, the majority of which promote fast food. In marketing materials, food is extensively styled to look particularly clean.

Imagine a beautiful pizza that might appear on a sign. A perfect crust ring with perfectly assigned pepperoni and melted cheese. Advertisers are clearly aiming to make food more appetizing. But does considerable aesthetics have other, potentially problematic effects on the impression of food?

On the one hand, beautiful aesthetics are inextricably linked to joy and indulgence. Seeing beautiful art and people activates the reward center of the brain, and observing beauty is essentially satisfying.

This connection with joy may make clean food look unhealthy, as people tend to consider joy and usefulness to be mutually exclusive. For example, many people have the general intuition that food is delicious or healthy, but not both.

On the other hand, certain types of aesthetics, called “classical” aesthetics, are characterized by the ideal patterns found in nature. For example, an important classical aesthetic feature is symmetry, which is also very common in nature.

Another prominent classical aesthetic feature includes order and systematic patterns. These are also essentially ubiquitous. By sports more of these natural-like visual features, it seems that food depictions may feel more natural.

People tend to think of natural things (eg organic foods and natural remedies) as healthier than unnatural things (eg highly processed foods and synthetic chemicals), so they look more natural. , Foods can look healthier. Therefore, because it reflects nature, it may look healthy (compared to ugly) when the same food is clean.

In a series of experiments, researchers found that when the same food looked clean, it was healthier, according to classical aesthetic principles (ie, symmetry, order, systematic patterns), compared to when it did not. I tested if it was recognized as being.

For example, in one experiment, participants evaluated avocado toast. Everyone read the same material and price information, but people were randomly assigned to see either pretty avocado toast or ugly avocado toast (photos were previously averaged differently clean) Was evaluated).

The information about food is the same, but respondents said that when looking at a clean version of avocado toast compared to an ugly version, they were generally healthy (eg, healthy, nutritious, low in calories). It was rated as more natural (eg pure, less processed).

Suspectedly, differences in natural judgments caused differences in health judgments. It did not affect other aspects such as freshness or size. Experiments with different food and cuteness manipulations returned the same pattern of results. This suggests that the effect is unlikely to be specific to a particular photo.

Importantly, these health decisions affect consumer behavior. In field experiments, people were willing to pay considerably more for peppers than ugly ones, and a significant portion of this increase in booking prices was due to similar increases in health judgments.

In another study, even if there was a financial incentive to correctly identify which of the two foods was low in calories, it was more likely to declare the target food as a low-calorie option when it was cleaner than when it was ugly. I did. The choice lost them money.

There are some important qualifications. First, the pretty = health effect is limited to classical aesthetics. For “expressive” aesthetics, use your imagination to carry out creative ideas, such as cutting them into fun shapes or arranging them to draw scenes, rather than natural patterns.

You can then reduce the pretty = healthy bias by displaying a disclaimer next to the food to remind people that the food has been artificially modified.

This effect of classical aesthetic principles is different, but influential, for marketers and public health advocates.

Hagen said, “Classical aesthetics can be an inexpensive and subtle new way to convey nature and health. This is an attribute that consumers increasingly demand from food. At the same time, clean food. Arrangements can optimistically distort nutritional estimates and adversely affect dietary decisions. From these findings, policy makers can consider change disclaimers as interventions or food images. You can also tighten regulations on providing objective nutritional information. “