When Reading Food Labels is NOT a Good Thing

 

As anyone who has been reading my posts for a while knows, I am a big fan of being able to decode the often confusing content of nutritional labels on foods and, obviously, of reading them. Even if the layout can sometimes be less than lucid the information about exactly what it is you are buying and (presumably) eating is worth knowing.

But is there ever a case when dissecting the nutrition labels can be less than a good idea? Or even a bad one?

Registered Dietician Isabel Vasquez says yes. Read her dissenting opinion here.

Why Walking Should Be in Your Daily Routine

 

We talk a lot here about foods and diet but regular exercise is also a leg of the healthy aging (and living) stool. If you’re dealing with obesity, depression, stress, heart problems, or joint pain, you should try walking more as it may be a big part of the solution to your health issues. Now I realize that some of us, for one reason or another, are unable to walk regularly. But for the rest of us, making a 30 minute walk a regular part of your day will pay big benefits.

Walking costs you nothing but time, requires nothing more than a decent pair of shoes, can be done alone or with friends, indoors or out in all sorts of weather and you can do (or start to do) it at any age. Most physicians favor walking for exercise over-running due to the fact that it is a low-impact exercise thus making it far less punishing on the joints and heart. Walking yields various health benefits regardless of how old or fit someone might be. It can also reduce the odds of developing various diseases and extend your lifespan.

If that is not enough to get you started (or motivate you to keep going), consider these specific health benefits of a regular walking habit.

Walking Improves Heart Health

A study that was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society stated that both women and men that were aged 65 years or more would be at lower risk for cardiovascular disease if they walk for no less than four hours each week. If you want to ward off any heart diseases and even the possibility of a stroke, be sure to get four hours or more of walking time in any given week. 

Heart attacks are a top cause of death all around the world, so if you can add a decade or two to your life just by walking more, you’d have to be at least careless to not do it.

Walking Helps Keep Your Weight Down

Walking can help you lose weight by burning off calories and is overall a great exercise for your whole body. If you live in a place where it is practical it could be a good idea to give your car a rest and walk to any nearby destinations. Not only will you lose weight, but you’ll also save money on the gas that you would have otherwise consumed by driving to your destinations. The bottom line is that walking will lighten your results on the scale and keep your wallet heavier.

Walking Can Reduce Your Risk of Diabetes

In the US alone, 37.3 million people have diabetes (2022 data) - that’s 11.3% of the US population. And 8.5 million people who have diabetes have not been diagnosed and do not know they have it. Another 96 million US adults have prediabetes. Considering that diabetes raises your risk of heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, nerve damage and hypertension, it seems like a free method for reducing your risk would be of interest to a whole lot of people.

There are many other reasons why making a walking routine a part of your day will make you a healthier, happier person.

For a list of 11 big benefits of walking, check out this article. Then grab your sneakers, call the dog, and get walking.

Menu Design is as Much Science as Art

 

You may assume that a menu is simply a list of a restaurant's current offerings and specials. You couldn't be more wrong. A menu is, rather, a carefully crafted and curated weapon in a psychological battle that you do not even know you are engaged in. From wine-appropriate music to authentic-sounding but meaningless foreign names, restaurateurs have many ways to persuade diners into ordering high-profit meals.

Research from Bournemouth University in the UK shows that most menus crowbar in far more dishes than people want to choose from. And when it comes to choosing food and drink, as an influential psychophysicist by the name of Howard Moskowitz once said: "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." For example, when asked what kind of coffee they like, most Americans will say: "a dark, rich, hearty roast". But actually, only 25% really want that. Most prefer weak, milky coffee. Judgement is clouded by aspiration, peer pressure and marketing messages. And this is where that menu you were just presented comes in.

A few years back, the author William Poundstone rather brilliantly annotated the menu from Balthazar in New York to reveal the marketing bells and whistles it uses to herd diners into parting with the maximum amount of cash. Professor Brian Wansink, author of Slim by Design, Mindless Eating Solutions to Every Day Life, has extensively researched menu psychology, or as he puts it, "menu engineering". "What ends up initially catching the eye," he says, "has an unfair advantage over anything a person sees later on." There's some debate about how people's eyes travel around menus, but Wansink reckons "we generally scan the menu in a z-shaped fashion starting at the top-left hand corner." Whatever the pattern, though, we're easily interrupted by items being placed in boxes, next to pictures or icons, bolded or in a different color.

Next time you are reading over a menu in your favorite eatery, here are five things to look for that are designed to influence your choice and get you to spend more.

1. Mouth Watering Graphics

Photographs and illustrations on a menu aren't just there to look pretty, they can also help drum up sales. According to the late Gregg Rapp, called the restaurant industry's original menu engineer, menu graphics act as visual cues that can help highlight which dishes the restaurant wants to sell most. Based on his research, he found that including a photo or image can raise the sale of the featured item as much as 30%.

2. Never Using Dollar Signs

This is especially common at fast food or smaller eateries. The absence of dollar signs on a menu isn't a mistake—it's actually a common menu engineering tactic that establishments use to help sell more food. Using dollar signs or including the word "dollar" on a menu causes the customer to focus on cost instead of food. Because of this, you may notice that many restaurants will include the price of the dish, without dollar signs, two spaces after the dish description in the same font and style. This is done to help draw less attention to how expensive the dishes are.

3. Flowery Details.

Ever read a menu and notice that instead of just simply listing out dish names a restaurant will include elaborate, detailed language for each? For instance, "spaghetti and meatballs" becomes "housemade pasta tossed in rustic tomato-garlic sauce, served with organic grass-fed thyme-infused meatballs." Restaurants not only do this to help the customer paint a mental picture of the dish but to also help distract them from how much they're spending. It's also believed that a more intricate description can help command a higher price.

4. Decoy Items

Most restaurants don't necessarily want you to order the most expensive entree on the menu. They want you to order the entree that they make the most money on. So they will commonly place a somewhat pricey item with a high-profit margin close to a noticeably more expensive item with a lower profit margin. By comparison, that makes the former option seem like a good deal and a responsible choice for diners. This practice is called "decoy pricing," and the wallet-busting item that effectively makes everything surrounding it seem like a better value is called "the anchor."

5. Nested Price Listing

We've all seen menus in which the prices are listed on the right-hand side, far away from the food choices. But when diners see this, it's all too easy to skim the prices, decide what they're comfortable spending, and then rule out any entrées above that number. With the prices shown right next to the item instead, diners are far more likely to consider all of their options and choose based on what sounds most delicious without consulting the price tag.

These are not even close to all the tricks that "menu engineers" have developed to coax you toward eating more and more expensively. If you want to read more about menu design and the psychology behind it, here is a place to get you started.