Pictures of foods contained on product packaging could make it more difficult to eat healthy by showing portion sizes larger than recommended that include extras, such as toppings or frosting on cakes that are not included on nutrition labels, a new study claims.

According to Dr. John Brand, lead author of a new study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition, and his colleagues at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, depictions of cakes that have been frosted on cake-mix boxes could cause consumers to overestimate serving size.

“If we see a slice of cake smothered in frosting on the cake box, we think that is what is normal to serve and eat,” he explained in a statement. “But that’s not what is reflected in the serving size recommendation on the nutrition label,” and can lead people to overestimate what constitutes an ordinary, healthy serving of the high-calorie desert, he and his colleagues found.

Posted warnings could make food packaging ‘less misleading’

Dr. Brand and his colleagues conducted a series of four studies to investigate the link between depictions on food packaging and their influence on assumed serving size. The studies used 51 different cake mixes to see if the pictures made people overestimate the number of calories that are depicted, which in turn could cause those individuals to serve too much.

For the first study, they compared the calorie content stated on the nutrition label with the actual calories of the cake and frosting as pictures on the box. In remaining studies, undergraduates or food-service professionals were given one of the typical cake mix boxes, and only some of them were informed that the frosting was not included on the nutritional label. The participants were then asked whether or not the depicted piece of cake constituted a reasonable serving.

The results of the first study showed that the average calorie content of the cake and frosting as pictured on the package exceeded the calories listed on the nutritional label by 134 percent. The studies involving undergraduate students found that informing people that the listed nutritional information did not include frosting caused them to serve smaller portions, and the final study found that even industry professionals tended to overserve cake without that information.

“Undoubtedly, companies don’t intend to deceive us when they include frosting in cake box depictions, but these seemingly small elements of packaging can have a huge impact,” explained co-author Dr. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab and author of Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. Simply including a warning that frosting or other extras are not included in nutritional labeling would make packaging “less misleading,” he and his fellow researchers concluded in their study.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Comments

comments