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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under FYI. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Dec 3, 2008
This is from a John Tierney piece in the New York Times:
Why, as Americans have paid more and more attention to eating healthily, have we kept getting fatter and fatter?
People who eat at McDonald's know their sins, but people at Subway think that a 1,000-calorie sandwich has only 500 calories.
The reason: the health halo created by advertisements, like one showing that a Subway sandwich had a third the fat of a Big Mac.
4 Responses to “The Health Halo Effect”
December 3rd, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Good post. I got hungry just reading it.
December 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I read the full Tierney piece. Apparently, anything a restaurant does to make people think there is something healthy about its food causes people to eat more.
Extrapolating, it is possible that NYC’s ban on trans fats is inducing the entire city to consume more calaories than it did before.
Tierney doesn’t endorse that conclusion, but he entertains it as a possibility
December 3rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Most health conscious people I know do not eat at Subway. CalorieCount.com shows the Calories in a 6″ Meatball Marinara has 560 calories and that is only in half the sandwich with NO extras. Imagine extra cheese and then add chips and a soda. I do know Subway sells White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies (220 calories for ONE cookie). How many people do you know convince themselves “just one”?
December 3rd, 2008 at 6:23 pm
You gotta know how to make healthy choices. People eat a muffin with 900 calories because they think it is healthy because it has 6 blueberries in it, those same people wouldn’t dare think of eating a 60 calorie slice of center cut bacon.
Subway can be healthier than most, get wheat bread, turkey, veggies, and water to drink.
In the end when you get down to it though the only major difference between say Subway and McDonalds is that at Subway you can get whole wheat buns. Why doesn’t McDonalds start offering them? Or BK? Or Wendys? OR arbys? Whichever did would make quite a bit.