The unhealthy-tasty intuition for online recipes - When healthiness perceptions backfire.

This study tests a common heuristic in the field of healthy foods, namely, the unhealthy-tasty intuition, in the new context of online recipes. An online experiment (representative sample in Austria in terms of age and gender) and a real-world study advertising an online recipe with various labels (healthy, tasty and neutral) confirm the unhealthy-tasty intuition and reveal that healthy recipes have a negative influence on behavioral intentions. Both health and taste inferences serve as underlying mechanisms explaining the influence of healthy recipes on behavioral intentions. The negative effect of a health label can be eliminated when adding a taste label as well. From a practical perspective, marketers are advised to include taste cues that stimulate taste expectations in the healthy recipes that they advertise, thus boosting healthy eating habits among consumers. PMID: 33321166 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Appetite - Category: Nutrition Authors: Tags: Appetite Source Type: research