Forks with healthy food

Elena/Adobe Stock

How to Make Healthy Food More Appealing to Americans

Describing how dishes are made increases people’s appetite for them.

For many Americans, the image associated with “spaghetti” is likely to be a heaping plate of steaming pasta smothered in tomato sauce, maybe with a few meatballs and a sprinkling of parmesan cheese.

“Whole wheat spaghetti,” on the other hand, sounds like a box of uncooked, unappetizing pasta.

Somehow, people instinctively imagine healthy foods as less prepared and less appealing, according to former Chicago Booth postdoctoral scholar Bradley Turnwald and Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach. The findings may have implications for how chefs, marketers, or even parents can make healthy food seem, well, sexier.

“The typical American, when you say ‘brussels sprouts,’ they either imagine them uncooked or boiled in water,” Fishbach says. But what if those brussels sprouts are described as roasted with a balsamic glaze? That’s much more appetizing, the study suggests.

Turnwald and Fishbach conducted seven experiments—both in the United States and India—in which they showed online participants photos of prepared and unprepared foods to determine how they visualize healthy and unhealthy foods. The paper was a sequel to earlier experiments in which the two researchers find that people tend to be more emotional when talking about unhealthy foods than healthy foods.

In one experiment in the US, Turnwald and Fishbach asked participants to look at a pair of photos for each of 12 healthy foods and 12 unhealthy foods. Each pair of photos included one that showed the food as fully prepared, meaning it was cooked or included toppings—for example, a photo of pancakes with maple syrup and fresh berries was paired with one of pancakes with no toppings. Pancakes were considered an unhealthy food for the purpose of the study, and in the pair of photos, all that differed was their preparation.

Imagine a tasty meal

The research finds that people tend to view healthy foods in less prepared or even raw forms. Because preparation can enhance flavor, these foods may be seen as less appealing.

The researchers instructed the participants to click on the images that looked more like “the first thing that comes to your mind.” The majority of the participants chose the more prepared version for unhealthy foods, and generally did the opposite for healthy foods. So, for example, people imagined hot dogs and nachos (less healthy) as fully prepared but vegetables and legumes as less-prepared or raw.

In another experiment, participants were also quicker to associate healthy with raw and unhealthy with prepared. Importantly, they believed that prepared versions of food taste better regardless of whether the food is healthy or unhealthy, the researchers find.

Participants in India had different perceptions, a finding Turnwald and Fishbach say reflects cultural differences in how Indians and Americans eat. The standard American diet is famously unhealthy. By contrast, “Indian culture has a rich tradition of eating heavily prepared plant-forward and vegetarian dishes,” they write.

When the researchers reran the experiment showing photos of more and less prepared dishes using culturally relevant foods in India, they find a significantly smaller effect. Participants still picked prepared versions as unhealthy more often than as healthy foods, but the margin was much narrower than in the US.

The findings imply that adding descriptions about how the food was prepared—to menus, advertisements, signage, or other materials—can change people’s perceptions. Turnwald and Fishbach ran an experiment presenting participants with real items from the Cheesecake Factory, from both its regular and lower-calorie “Skinnylicious” menus. Presenting four full-calorie and four low-calorie dishes, they changed how each of the items was described. Participants in one group could order “artichokes,” for example, while those in another saw the exact same offering described as “chargrilled artichokes served with lemon-garlic aioli.” Participants rated each dish on how appealing it sounded and how likely they were to order it.

The descriptions increased the likelihood that people thought of the dishes as appetizing. “When you tell people how healthy foods are made, they want to get them,” Fishbach says. The result may offer an easy way to influence healthier food choices.

More from Chicago Booth Review

Related Topics

More from Chicago Booth

Related Topics

Your Privacy
We want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy. Please review Chicago Booth's privacy notice, which provides information explaining how and why we collect particular information when you visit our website.