Is a Restaurant a Diet Trap?

It’s hard to follow your healthful eating plan when you eat away from home. But eating out is nearly inevitable. Since the obvious way to cope is to make the best choices you can, you may choose to dine at a “healthy” fast-food restaurant that promises low-calorie meals.

And therein lies the problem.

Food psychologist Brian Wansink, PhD, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, is committed to research that helps Americans understand the reasons they choose to eat certain foods, and he’s got the perfect platform from which to communicate his findings. He was appointed as the executive director of the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, a position that makes him responsible for developing the new 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and sorting out the Food Guide Pyramid and other programs that haven't made much of an impact.

Wansink, who confesses that he eats more fast food than he should, stated in the Journal of Consumer Research that he and his researchers have uncovered an interesting mindset that most of us share: "We found that when people go to restaurants claiming to be healthy, such as Subway, they choose additional side items containing up to 131% more calories than when they go to restaurants like McDonald’s that don’t make this claim.”

If you think you’re eating healthy at a place such as Subway (where we all know that Jared lost an incredible 245 pounds), you tend to treat yourself to a little something extra. Ironically, when Wansink’s study participants eat at McDonald’s, which hasn’t been as aggressive in marketing its foods as low calorie, they tend to eat fewer calories than they do when they visit Subway.

Consumers’ perception of the food as healthy extends across the menu board to items beyond the low-calorie lunch that Jared repeatedly ordered. Wansink calls this the “halo effect.” When you eat cookies at a “healthy” restaurant, you don’t feel as indulgent because you’ve ordered other things that are supposedly good for you. That’s why customers underestimated their tally of calories by 21%—after all, they were eating at a healthy place.

Marketing campaigns from restaurants such as Subway are effective, but Wansink stresses that if you believe a restaurant is healthy, chances are you’ll eat too much, adding on sodas, side orders, or desserts. Researchers conclude that this is the reason these restaurants haven’t had much success at lowering obesity rates, even though they offer low-calorie options.

— Michele Deppe