The Primacy of “What” over “How Much”: How Type and Quantity Shape Healthiness Perceptions of Food Portions

Abstract

Healthy eating goals influence many consumer choices, such that evaluating the healthiness of food portions is important. Given that both the type and quantity of food jointly contribute to weight and overall health, evaluations of a food portion’s healthiness ought to consider both type and quantity. However, existing literature tends to examine food type and food quantity separately. Across seven studies, we show that consumers treat type as a primary dimension and quantity as a secondary dimension, such that a change in type (versus quantity) has a greater impact on perceived healthiness or health goal impact, even when holding objective impact constant in terms of calories. We also examine whether one reason this effect occurs is because most consumers consider type (a categorical attribute) before quantity (a continuous attribute). We conclude by discussing extensions of these ideas to other perceptual assessments involving both type and quantity (e.g., price perceptions). The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3098 . This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, decision analysis.

Cutting Calories: The Preference for Lower Caloric Density Versus Smaller Quantities Among Restrained and Unrestrained Eaters

“…First, healthiness may be particularly relevant as a popular reason for choosing from a lower-calorie consideration set in general. Food categorization strongly affects healthiness perceptions (Chernev and Gal 2010; Liu et al 2019; Oakes 2005), and such perceptions are based much more heavily on food “type” (e.g., almonds vs. chocolate) than amount (e.g., a half-cup vs. one cup of almonds) (Liu et al 2019). Although we focus on within-product-type changes (e.g., lower-fat vs. regular-fat chocolate chip cookie) rather than across-product-type changes (e.g., almonds vs. chocolate), we predict that these prior findings on healthiness perceptions will generalize conceptually, such that a larger but less calorically dense version of an indulgent food will be perceived as healthier than a smaller but more calorically dense version.…”

“…Rather than focus on choices between a higher-calorie option and one kind of lower-calorie option, our paradigm focuses the choice set on different kinds of lower-calorie options—those achieved by lowering caloric density versus portion size. This research thus utilizes an approach most analogous to Liu et al (2019), who examined healthiness perceptions of portion sizes of different types of food (e.g., a half-cup of almonds vs. a quarter-cup of chocolate candies), finding that healthiness perceptions are affected more by food type than by portion size.…”

Do Claims about the Naturalness and Dose of Cosmetics Ingredients Affect the Public’s Perception of Their Safety?

“…For example, one study found that people expected to gain more weight from eating "one mini Snickers" than from eating "one cup of 1% fat cottage cheese, three carrots and three pears", even though the latter portion contains 12 times more calories [59]. When judging the healthiness of a meal or food portion, people consider first its content, and only in a second step the size of the portion [60].…”

Scarce Foods are Perceived as Having More Calories

“…Consequently, adding a health grade to an abundant food should lead to lower calorie estimates. We based this prediction on research showing that in the absence of other motivational factors, people default to the assumption that healthy foods are low calorie (Liu et al., in press). Conversely, scarce food is perceived as valuable and expensive in the absence of a health grade.…”

“…A primary factor contributing to obesity is people's inaccuracy at food calorie estimation (O'Brien, Kahn, Zenko, Fernandez, & Ariely, ). Research shows that calorie estimates of food differ as a function of its macronutrients (i.e., fats, carbohydrates, protein; Liu et al., in press), size (Scott, Nowlis, Mandel, & Morales, ), and presence of accompanying foods in a meal (Jiang & Lei, ). In each of these cases, differences in people's calorie estimates resulted from varying food properties with direct relevance to caloric content.…”