Pitching Nutrition: Dogma that Bites

From the Annals of Duh comes a new study in press to remind us that when we’re pitching nutrition, being dogmatic comes back to bite us. It seems that just giving children healthy food — without telling them how wonderful it is — increases the odds that they’ll actually eat it.

Two marketing professors, Michal Maimaran of Northwestern University and Ayelet Fishback of the University of Chicago, conducted a series of five experiments with preschoolers to see what messages were most persuasive for getting them to eat nutritious foods.

Working systematically through the questions, they found that telling kids that food will make them strong leads them to eat less of it. They figure it won’t taste as good. Likewise telling them that the food will help them learn to read or learn to count also undermined the cause of getting them to eat it. In fact, even telling them that the food is yummy had no affect. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help, either.

The best bet seems to be simply serving good food without all the nutrition dogma.

Maybe it’s only adults who can be duped by health claims on food.

Click here to read more in the New York Times and here to download the paper to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Eat Your Vegetables, photograph © MisterDavidC / flickr

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