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Make Vegetables More Appealing! (How To Tips!)
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Want to persuade your kids to eat their veggies? It turns out that just changing the name to something more appealing might be all you need to do— and it works just as well on adults too.
A Stanford University study conducted in their own dining hall on campus proved that marketing can play a role in helping people make healthier eating decisions.
The researchers took the same dish, which featured butternut squash, as the primary ingredient, and simply labelled it in four different ways to observe if these changes would influence how many people would order it.
The dish was given a basic name: butternut squash, a healthy restrictive name : butternut squash with no added sugar, a healthy positive name: antioxidant-rich butternut squash, and the final group received an indulgent name: twisted garlic-ginger butternut squash wedges.
There were no differences in how these dishes were prepared or with the ingredients that were used. Only the name was changed, and over the course of the six-week study, the researchers noticed some fascinating changes in how popular the dish was based on how it was described.
During the study, over 8000 people selected the butternut squash dish under one if its four names. The indulgent name proven to be the most popular one by far, while the healthy restrictive name was the least popular. 41 percent more people chose to order the butternut squash when it was given the indulgent description versus the healthy restrictive name. The indulgently titled squash dishes were also chosen by 35 percent more people than the healthy positive description, and by 25 percent more than the basic description, which was simply butternut squash.
All it took to significantly increase the number of people eating a healthy dish was to change the name to something that sounded more appealing. These findings contrast with the current technique favored by certain marketers and nutritionists of labelling foods in ways that emphasize their healthy qualities. The example of that in this experiment would be the healthy positive description. To be fair, this group ranked second in popularity, but it was still outshined by the dishes that were given luxurious names.
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