Can Food Marketers Not Make Us Fat?

As consumers, we’ve grown accustomed to hearing conflicting information about nutrition. What’s new is that we are now confused about how we should think about food marketers themselves. Just when it seemed that “big food” had been officially designated as the tobacco industry of the new millennia, news reports tell us that junk food producers are having a hard time and that food companies may one day receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine. In the last few weeks we’ve heard how Hostess brands, the makers of Twinkie and Sno Ball, has gone under, prompting a feeding frenzy for the last items on the shelf and on eBay. And that PepsiCo is cranking out “good for you” products that are not just ”fat-free” but actually “fat blocking”. So, are food marketers really making us fat, and is any other way possible?

For the lead article of this month’s issue of Nutrition Review (“Does Food Marketing Need to Make us Fat? A Review and Solution”), Brian Wansink and I scoured a host of marketing studies and examined current marketing trends to answer this question (watch video interview here). We identified changes that food companies can implement to help consumers eat less while growing their business.

Four ways food marketing influences what we eat and can make us eat better

1.  Pricing is one of the strongest influences of marketing on obesity and explains why obesity mainly plagues lower-income consumers. Within the last thirty years, the price of food has drastically declined, prompting people to consume more. If fast food prices were increased by a mere 10 percent, the obesity rate would decrease by 0.7 percent. People accelerate their consumption of products purchased at what they regard as a lower price. Fortunately, this also works for healthier foods. For example, offering quantity discounts can induce consumers to purchase more fruit and vegetables. Even better, these short-term incentives, far from backfiring when they end, can develop people’s taste for healthier fare

2.  Through marketing communication, food marketers are masters at getting people to crave and consume the foods that they promote. Often, advertisements are geared to respond to the short-term desires expressed by the consumer for tastier, more convenient and less expensive foods. So, it’s not surprising that 72 percent of television advertising for food promotes candy, cereal, and fast food. A study in Montréal proved that banning television advertising during children’s programming reduced consumption of sugared cereal and trips to fast food restaurants. However, simply promoting foods as healthy to consumers may not be effective because of the perception that they taste worse. We propose that healthy foods should be re-branded on non-health-related benefits like natural taste or sustainable production. Health benefits are just not that motivating, especially for kids and teens.

3.  The tastiness and package size of a food product can have an effect on satiety and how much a person ultimately consumes. Increasing the flavour complexity and number of components in a food improves its overall tastiness rating. Offering healthy foods that have more flavour complexity, such as a fruit salad (instead of a whole fruit) can increase consumption due to both variety and convenience. We know that larger package sizes can lead people to eat more. But reducing the size of less healthy foods by elongating the packages makes the size reduction less visible, which should make choosing a smaller size more tempting. Furthermore, restaurants should offer smaller portions on the menu. Even if nobody chooses them, they make other portions look bigger and encourage people to eat less.

4.  The eating environment may promote “mindless” consumption that prompts people to eat more food than they realise. We know that the more visible and accessible a food is, the more of it will be consumed. So displaying healthy foods in highly visible areas will increase consumption. For example, fast food restaurants could display attractive pictures of salads and vegetables more prominently, and grocery stores could replace candy with fruit and healthy snacks at the register. This and previous research shows that small changes in the eating environment can make a significant difference to our waistlines.

Overall, it is hard to argue—as some still do—that bad parenting, not food marketing, explains obesity. Understanding the four ways in which food marketing is making us eat too much – as well as solutions to counter this trend – will determine which food marketers will have a hard time making money without making us fat, and which ones will make more by selling less.