Assimilation of healthy and indulgent impressions from labelling influences fullness but not intake or sensory experience

Abstract

Background: Recent evidence suggests that products believed to be healthy may be over-consumed relative to believed indulgent or highly caloric products. The extent to which these effects relate to expectations from labelling, oral experience or assimilation of expectations is unclear. Over two experiments, we tested the hypotheses that healthy and indulgent information could be assimilated by oral experience of beverages and influence sensory evaluation, expected satiety, satiation and subsequent appetite. Additionally, we explored how expectation-experience congruency influenced these factors. Results: Results supported some assimilation of healthiness and indulgent ratings-study 1 showed that indulgent ratings enhanced by the indulgent label persisted post-tasting, and this resulted in increased fullness ratings. In study 2, congruency of healthy labels and oral experience promoted enhanced healthiness ratings. These healthiness and indulgent beliefs did not influence sensory analysis or intake-these were dictated by the products themselves. Healthy labels, but not experience, were associated with decreased expected satiety. Conclusions: Overall labels generated expectations, and some assimilation where there were congruencies between expectation and experience, but oral experience tended to override initial expectations to determine ultimate sensory evaluations and intake. Familiarity with the sensory properties of the test beverages may have resulted in the use of prior knowledge, rather than the label information, to guide evaluations and behaviour.

Food-variety-focused labelling does not increase ideal portion size, expected fullness or snack intake.

“…when assessing effects of health labels on the sensory evaluation, expected fullness, and intake of congruent and incongruent beverages (Hovard & Yeomans, 2015). Further research should explore whether presenting variety labels with unfamiliar/novel foods, or removing the sensory information provided by the food (e.g.…”

Room for dessert!

“…However, in general, individuals do not tend to compensate energy intake across meals (see e.g., Levitsky et al, 2019). Additionally, the effect of labels may be moderated by prior knowledge (e.g., satiety expectations) of the product, implying that a label denoting the satiating power of a product might be more influential for an unknown product than for a (highly) familiar product (see e.g., Hovard & Yeomans, 2015;Brunstrom et al, 2008;Brunstrom et al, 2011). This is one of the first studies to investigate the effect of information about the satiating value of a food on intake, and, additionally we explored the effect of providing such information on SSS.…”