Yesterday on a checkout line as an impulse I grabbed a 3 Musketeers bar as a dessert/snack. When I got home and went to unwrap it I see the nutrition info on the bottom of the wrapper was listed large and in bright green shading all the way across so I thought, “Oh they must have added like calcium or something to pretend like the candy is healthy for you.” Read it and no, still just chocolaty, sugary badness which I then proceeded to scarf down. (1. It was delicious and 2. I am 90% sure it was okay for me to eat during Passover).
Not even a day later (this morning) I see a link to this on Twitter. It is about how candy companies have taken to using Green nutrition labels because it makes people assume it is healthier. And dammit if that wasn’t true! I mean, I read it and saw that it wasn’t, but I sure assumed it was before reading. Funny, sometimes those psychologists know what they are talking about.
Just watched a show called…something. It was on… some TV channel. Anyway, the show was about human assumptions and how marketers use our own brains against us. One segment showed the same super cheap, boxed wine being poured into 2 identical bottles. Each bottle then had a label applied by the researcher. One label was plain and unpretentious, the other looked aged and upscale. Subjects were then brought in and asked to taste test each wine. They were shown the bottle and told that the plain label was cheaper wine and the fancy label was expensive wine. You guessed it, in every case the upscale label somehow made the wine taste amazingly better! It was comical to listen to the subjects rate the plain label wine as “barely drinkable” and the fancy label as “the best I’ve ever had”. Equally comical was their reaction when told it was the same super cheap wine in each bottle.
We are odd, but apparently predictable, creatures.
This kind of social psychology is just fascinating to me. Some of the most pioneering research into human behavior is being done by corporations. Generally speaking, humans are really confident in their own perceptions but really terrible at perceiving things accurately.
Of course, the more I learn about the fucked up way those corporations exploit that knowledge, the more I never want to touch another piece of processed food again.
(Just finished this book*, apparently still pretty riled up about it.)
**Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
*
I listened to that author on CBC One a few weeks ago and it made me want to buy that book. It is CRAZY what these companies do to bring in the profit. Scary crazy.
That’s what I do. I wouldn’t have even noticed the green label. I would have seen the nommy Cadbury cream egg and knew that I might as well just rub it on my thighs, because that’s right where its going to go.
Sugarcane farming is outrageously bad for the environment, and replaces native ecosystems in sensitive areas. And there’s nothing moderate or sustainable about the amount of sugar grown and processed worldwide. The candy and cereal sections of any grocery store are ample evidence of that.
In the UK at least, food labels have a “traffic light” colour system for calories, fat, saturates, sugar and salt. Green indicates that the food is officially* not bad for you. So, like the OP, I would be totally fooled by the green labels.
I don’t actually know who came up with the system - maybe the Food Standards Agency?
If you want to read a general book about how you are fooled into quick decisions, read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. He postulates two subsystems within human brains, one for immediate reactions and one for thought-out ones. The quick decision in this case is to assume that a green label means that something is good for you. The slow one is to read the label and figure out what it means. If you don’t want to be fooled, read the label in the future.
I wouldn’t. The “traffic light” symbols are totally separate from the nutrition info panel, and are a standard design. You couldn’t possibly confuse a green-tinted nutrition panel for a traffic-light symbol.
