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"Tricks to Get Adults to Eat Healthier"
We saw that just changing the name of healthy foods
can have a significant impact on children's eating habits.
Are adults as gullible?
Yes!
For example, people actually report
"traditional Cajun red beans and rice"
tastes better than just "red beans and rice"
even though they were both the exact same dish!
It's funny, back in World War II
much of domestic meat was shipped overseas,
just leaving lots of organs behind-
the hearts, kidneys, brains, stomachs, intestines,
even the feet, ears, and heads of cows, hogs, sheep, and chickens.
The challenge was how they are gonna to convince people,
encourage people to eat chicken heads.
To accomplish this, the Dept. of Defense
evidently enlisted dozens of the brightest, most famous, psychologists
to determine how dietary change could be accomplished.
Apparently, taste wasn't the problem.
People would eat brains as long as you didn't tell them
they were eating brains.
So, their solution was to invent mystery meat.
Just don't tell consumers what they're eating.
And the same can apply with healthier foods.
As with organ meats in the1940s,
the suggestion that a food contains soy may be so powerful
that some people convince themselves that they do not like the taste.
For example, if you give someone an energy bar
that says it has soy protein in it
people rate it as grainy and tasteless,
compared to identical bars with no mention of the word soy.
In reality, there was no soy in EITHER of the bars!
It's what you call a "phantom ingredient" taste test.
Simply the suggested presence of soy
made people believe they tasted it, and they evaluated it accordingly.
In general, "a large percentage of consumers"
"taste what they want to taste."
So can you use the same vegetable sneak attack tactic
so successful in children?
Covertly adding hidden pureed vegetables to meals
works for adults too—and even for vegetables they didn't like.
"It was shown that the adults’ dislike of the vegetables"
"that were incorporated into the entrees"
"did not affect the consumption of the vegetable-enhanced entrees."
Who couldn’t use a little vegetable enhancement?
This indicates that the incorporation of pureed vegetables
into entrees increased the intake of vegetables
even when the added vegetable was disliked.
The big babies...
And of course the more vegetables you eat
the less calories you get-
so you get a twin benefit.
They were eating up to a pound of vegetables a day
and 350 fewer calories. More food, less calories.
Keep that up you could lose 30 pounds a year
without even trying.