Health Quest II: Know Your Opponent

Just like every good military tactician understands their opponents (read Tzu's "Ancient Art of War"), learn the tactics that are being used against you. Read nutrition labels suspiciously! You would be surprised by what they communicate, or what they hide. For example, you can look at the nutritional labels of 2 different bread brands and see that one has 2 grams of fiber per serving, while the other has 1 gram. A cursory glance would lead you to believe that the first loaf is the healthier option because it has more fiber per serving. But wait… look closer, the top of the label shows that the first loaf lists 2 slices of bread as a single serving and the second says that 1 slice of bread is a single serving. Huh. The amount of actual fiber per slice of bread is the same for these loaves! Sneaky.

“Know before you go.”

1. Marketing tactics

Marketing tacticians love to use colors, right, I wrote color. The color of foods, packaging, and even the dishes being eaten from all affect our eating. Even color variety within a meal can influence how much you eat. Red–green colors, for example, are used by us instinctively to estimate calorie content! Bright red means more calories and predicts greater arousal to those foods, while bright green does the exact opposite, whether the foods are artificially or naturally colored. Those artificial colors actually hijack our brain to make foods look more energy abundant, thus more appealing. That's right, those ultra-processed foods are not just built to taste hyper-palatable, they are designed to look like supermodels.

2. Hyper-plateable foods

Interestingly enough, eat your food off of a white plate, you may eat less food that way. Eating off red plates has a similar effect. Although the effect has been somewhat inconsistent across studies, it's an interesting idea, and there is further evidence that it may just be that high contrast between plate color and food color (like dark food on a white plate) might help make portion sizes easier to manage and keep you from eating too much.

3. Packaging propaganda

Along those same lines, the color of packaging influences our decision-making. Green packages telegraph that the contents are healthy, driving you to buy the product, whereas red packages scream that the foods have way too much energy, actually reducing their perceived healthiness. Cool colored packages (i.e., greens and blues) signal that the product is healthier and more sustainable, if not less tasty. On the other hand, warm, vibrant packaging activates the hedonistic brain, that rewards circuit and the inhibitory control regions of the brain.

4. Variety is the spice… of death

One more interesting aspect of color is that the more color variety you have in a meal, the more sensory-specific satiety is delayed. So if you have lots of colors on your plate in the form of foods, there's a bigger chance that you're going to eat more than you should. Color variety is even considered one of the big three food properties that influence intake (right alongside portion size and energy density). To top it all off, greater dietary variety goes hand in hand with increased body weight and fat! That's what makes those all-you-can-eat buffet restaurants so metabolically dangerous. Have you ever noticed that you rarely get full at those restaurants, despite going back over and over for plate after plate of food?

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