Organic food labels give perception that products are healthier

Organic food labels give perception that products are healthier

Organic food labeled and packaged as such brings about the belief in shoppers that these products are tastier and healthier than regular food items, a new survey reveals.

To test the perception of 144 people regarding organic food, a graduate student researcher at Cornell University asked them to rate yogurt, cookies and potato chips from a scale of 1 to 9 on 10 qualities including taste, fat content, calorie count and price. The participants were asked what they think about the product and were not informed beforehand that all the items were organic even if some were labeled as "regular".

The findings, presented Sunday at a convention of the American Society for Nutrition at Washington, D.C., showed that the participants rated products labeled "organic" as tastier than the "regular" ones even if all of them are actually organic.

Aside from taste, those perceived as organic food were rated as higher in fiber, lower in fat, lower in calories and worth the higher price.

Study author Jenny Wan-chen Lee, a graduate student at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell, wanted to test the so-called halo effect theory on food products.

In this case, any food that is labeled as "organic" is perceived to be more nutritious and tastier even though their nutritional content shows otherwise. Wan-chen termed this phenomenon as a "health halo".

The organic food study is to be presented at the Experimental Biology 2011 meeting and may soon be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Results of this study suggest that people should pay attention and examine more carefully the labels of items claiming to be organic food.

Posted by enriquez on Monday April 11 2011, 4:55 AM EST. Ref: HealthDay. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Shopping. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0