Academic Consortium Publications for May 2022

Although it might seem paradoxical, safe and convenient modern foods are also contributing to an epidemic of overweightness and obesity. Producers have a lot more information about their products than do consumers, and it seems that providing nutritional information in tiny type on food packages is not doing enough to solve the problem. What could help? A recent paper in Food Quality and Preference (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950329322001239#!) investigates the effect of adding prominent warning labels to advertisements to call out foods that contain excessive sodium, sugar, and saturated fat. They found that consumers extracted similar information from advertisements with and without these warning labels. But consumers who saw the warning labels extracted additional nutrition-related information. So consumers who did not see these warning labels were less aware of the nutritional properties. As the researchers point out, sharing nutritional information may nudge consumers to make healthier choices. This is one of more than a dozen manuscripts published in May 2022 by members of the Academic Consortium. (Warning: do not read these publications while driving or operating heavy machinery.)