Why healthy fast food flops....

[archerships]

Malcolm Gladwell has a number of fascinating articles on his site. Be sure to check it out.

March 5, 2001
ANNALS OF EATING
The Trouble with Fries
Fast food is killing us. Can it be fixed?
Malcolm Gladwell
http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_03_05_a_fries.htm

Leann Birch, a developmental psychologist at Penn State, has
looked at the impact of these sorts of expectations on children. In
one experiment, she took a large group of kids and fed them a big
lunch. Then she turned them loose in a room with lots of junk
food. "What we see is that some kids eat almost nothing,"
she says. "But other kids really chow down, and one of the
things that predicts how much they eat is the extent to which
parents have restricted their access to high-fat, high-sugar food
in the past: the more the kids have been restricted, the more
they eat." Birch explains the results two ways. First, restricting
food makes kids think not in terms of their own hunger but in
terms of the presence and absence of food. As she puts it, "The
kid is essentially saying, 'If the food's here I better get it while I
can, whether or not I'm hungry.' We see these five-year-old kids
eating as much as four hundred calories." Birch's second finding,
though, is more important. Because the children on restricted
diets had been told that junk food was bad for them, they clearly
thought that it had to taste good. When it comes to junk food,
we seem to follow an implicit script that powerfully biases the
way we feel about food. We like fries not in spite of the fact
that they're unhealthy but because of it.

Comments

[pjammer.livejournal.com]

Gladwell RULES.

Have you purchased his book, the Tipping Point? Been reading and re-reading it for over a year and I am still not tired of it.

Re:

[crasch.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't read it yet--but I will definitely check it out.