Can “Low-Fat” Nutrition Labels Lead to Obesity?

By Brian Wansink, Pierre Chandon. 2006

777 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Marketing, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a33cfc53974c8dd70ddf367ee79ee3bb6a8c9e64

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Citations in the corpus

The Effect of Marketer-Suggested Serving Size on Consumer Responses: The Unintended Consequences of Consumer Attention to Calorie Information (2012, methodology): “In support of this hypothesis, Wansink and Chandon (2006) show that “low-fat” labels increase consumption because they reduce the anticipated guilt of consumption.”
Supersize in One Dimension, Downsize in Three Dimensions: Effects of Spatial Dimensionality on Size Perceptions and Preferences (2009, background): “For example, tall, thin glasses are perceived as containing a greater volume than short, wide glasses (Raghubir and Krishna 1999; Wansink and Van Ittersum 2003).”
Categorization Effects in Value Judgments: Averaging Bias in Evaluating Combinations of Vices and Virtues (2010, background): “Consistent with the notion that larger meals are perceived as having more calories (Chandon and Wansink 2007b; Scott et al. 2008; Wansink and Chandon 2006b), these size-based inferences are likely to work in a direction opposite to health-based inferences, leading to an increase, rather than a…”
The “Fair Trade” Effect (2012, background): “In this case, however, consumers may miss that foods labeled ‘‘low-fat’’ are unlikely to contain fewer calories because snack food manufacturers typically replace calories from fat with calories from added sugars to enhance taste (Wansink & Chandon, 2006).”
Traffic Lights and Food Choice: A Choice Experiment Examining the Relationship Between Nutritional Food Labels and Price (2010, background): “In related research on health claims on food Wansink and Chandon (2006) note that consumers who select a healthy food option frequently over compensate with some sort of indulgence, yielding a negative impact in terms of their dietary intake.”
Can information costs affect consumer choice? Nutritional labels in a supermarket experiment (2013, neutral): “Yet, simple claims, such as low fat labels could potentially mislead consumers and increase their caloric food intake through perceptions of an increased acceptable serving size and a reduction in consumption guilt (Wansink and Chandon, 2006), especially when combined with a positive image Internati”
The “organic” path to obesity? Organic claims influence calorie judgments and exercise recommendations (2010, methodology): “…as lower in fat (Andrews, Netemeyer, & Burton, 1998) and that nutrient-based claims can promote calorie underestimation, thought to be an important factor in the obesity crisis (Lichtman et al., 1992; Young & Nestle, 2002; Wansink & Chandon, 2006a, 2006b; Chandon & Wansink, 2007).”
The Best of Both Worlds? Effects of Attribute-Induced Goal Conflict on Consumption of Healthful Indulgences (2012, background): “Consumers’ tendency to overgeneralize health claims often results in misleading inferences on the amount of calories contained in the food and, thus, in overestimation of the appropriate amount to eat (Wansink 2004; Wansink and Chandon 2006).”