As a continuation of the last blog post about why we choose to overeat – Cornell also studied a whole list of other triggers for eating more food. One that kept coming up again and again was the phenomenon of the ‘health halo’. People tended to overeat at so called healthy restaurants and felt that a meal selection at McDonald’s would be much more calorie dense than an identical meal served at Subway.

Also, people studied had a tendency to assume that foods labeled as organic/low-fat/healthy/etc. were automatically low calorie selections, when in fact they were not. Please don’t be fooled by the health halo and move to assume a food is a healthy choice just because the marketing says so! Marketers can be quite deceiving, so ALWAYS check the ingredients list as well as the nutrition facts label on every single food item you consume. And any food option, healthy or not, still needs to be portion controlled in order to control your calorie intake!

Jessica Hummel, Nutrition Counselor