Why fries are more appetizing than green beans

Imagine a dish that would really make you happy. Try to forget for a moment any considerations of health or weight, the only criterion should be: “What do you really want to eat?” » Take a moment to visualize it. Which image came to your mind, that of a plate of fatty and salty fries or that of a small green bean salad?

Probably the first option, as we tend to think that healthy food is necessarily less tasty. But why this association? We seem to learn it from the “food environment” we are exposed to, according to results obtained by Sonja Kunz and her colleagues at the University of Vienna. In their study, participants viewed a series of photographs of dishes, each time with an evaluation of their taste (a number of stars, out of a maximum of five) and an estimate of their interest in health (for example by the nutriscore). However, the more they viewed foods that were both delicious and unhealthy from a nutritional point of view, the more they tended to think that these two properties were automatically associated. So perhaps it’s the overexposure to these “deliciously bad” dishes, for example with there junk foodor to online comments highlighting this aspect (“I fell for this little raclette, too bad for my arteries!”) which leads us to believe it is impossible to combine pleasure and a healthy meal.

How can we reconnect in the minds of consumers what is good for health and taste? A consequence of these results is that it will not be enough to create good and healthy dishes or to promote them in communication campaigns: as long as advertisements, restaurants and supermarkets do not offer more balanced dishes than junk food, our perceptions are likely to remain unchanged. In other words, it is our global food environment that needs to be modified.