Fast-food restaurants and vending machine operators have increased their healthful offerings in recent years, but sales growth in the fast-food industry isn’t coming from healthful menu items. Instead, it’s from sales of more burgers and fries. A Duke University research may have an explanation. He finds that just seeing a salad on the menu seems to push some consumers to make a less healthful meal choice. The effect, dubbed “vicarious goal fulfillment,” allows a person to feel a goal has been met if they have taken some small action, such as considering a salad without actually ordering it.

 

In a lab experiment, participants possessing high levels of self-control related to food choices (as assessed by a pre-test) avoided French fries, the least healthy item on a menu, when presented with only unhealthy choices. But when a side salad was added to this menu, they became much more likely to take the fries. The findings are published in the online edition of the Journal of Consumer Research.

 

“There is clearly public demand for healthy options, so we wanted to know why people aren't following through and purchasing those items,” says Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, who led the research.

 

Working with colleagues at Baruch College and Loyola College in Maryland, Fitzsimons asked research participants to select a food item from one of two pictorial menus. Half of the participants saw a menu of unhealthful items, including only French fries, chicken nuggets, and a baked potato with butter and sour cream. The rest of the participants were given the same three options, plus the choice of a side salad.

 

When the side salad was added, a few consumers did actually choose it. However, the vast majority of consumers did not, and went toward less healthful options. Ironically, this effect was strongest among those consumers who normally had high levels of self-control.

 

“In this case, the presence of a salad on the menu has a liberating effect on people who value healthy choices,” Fitzsimons says. “We find that simply seeing, and perhaps briefly considering, the healthy option fulfills their need to make healthy choices, freeing the person to give in to temptation and make an unhealthy choice. In fact, when this happens people become so detached from their health-related goals, they go to extremes and choose the least healthy item on the menu.”

 

Two other test menus showed the same effect. The researchers had participants choose from menus contrasting a bacon cheeseburger, chicken sandwich, and fish sandwich with a veggie burger. And they also used a menu with chocolate covered Oreos, original Oreos, and golden Oreos against a 100-calorie pack of Oreos and obtained the same result.

 

"Adding the healthier option caused people with high self-control to choose the least healthy option possible. Even though it was not their first choice before the healthy option was included," says Lauren Block of Baruch College and a coauthor of the study.

 

The team's findings suggest that encouraging people to make better choices may require significant effort on the part of both food service providers and customers. Schools and other establishments concerned with promoting healthy behaviors may need to take an extreme approach and eliminate all unhealthy food, Fitzsimons says. “It sounds quite drastic, but because the effect of mixing healthy and unhealthy choices is so powerful, we would suggest that the safest way to get children to eat well is to take the pizza, fries and other junk foods completely out of schools, and replace them with healthy foods,” he says.