Food for Thought: The Impact of Counterfactual Thinking on the Use of Nutrition Information

Abstract

The Center for Disease Control and prevention classifies obesity as the number two preventable cause of death, a disease that leads to about 300,000 deaths each year (Center for Disease Control and Prevention 2005). In support of this statistic, a recent study warns that obesity has increased at an alarming rate and estimate that by the year 2015, 41 percent of U.S. adults will suffer from obesity and 75 percent will be overweight (Wang and Beydoun (2007). This trend is largely driven by an inactive lifestyle, a poor diet and inferior nutrition choices. In an attempt to curb this trend and offer consumers more helpful nutrition information, legislators have passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) in 1990. The primary goal of NLEA was to provide comprehensible nutrition information to “assist consumers in maintaining healthy dietary practices” (NLEA 1990). Subsequent regulations stemming from NLEA mandated the presence of a standardized nutrition facts panel on food packages and limited the use of misleading health claims on food products (Ford et al. 1996). By offering easy to read and accurate information on serving size, calories, fats, cholesterol, sodium and other content requirements as a % daily value, the Nutrition Facts Panel was designed to help consumers make more informed food choices. Through such regulations, NLEA hoped to ultimately reduce the long term social and healthcare cost resulting from obesity and other diet-related diseases (Food and Drug Administration 1993; Garretson and Burton 2000; Kozup, Creyer and Burton 2003; Balasubramanian and Cole 2002).