'Health halo' foods not so healthy

Parents choosing foods for their children are significantly more likely to purchase ‘health halo’ products — branded to cause misleading assumptions of good nutritional value — when they only view package images and don’t examine nutritional labels, according to new research by a Northwell Health paediatrician Dr Ruth Milanaik, DO.

Dr Milanaik, Director of the Neonatal Neurodevelopmental Follow Up Program at Cohen Children's Medical Centre in New Hyde Park, concentrated her studies on factors affecting children’s food choices, including those parents made on their behalf and those depicted on popular children’s television shows.

Her study, ‘Defeating the Health Halo: Parental Food Choices for Grade-School Children’, asked 1013 parents to choose from pairs of food products in which one health halo item was matched with a more obviously unhealthy item with a similar nutritional label. These included pairings of Naked Smoothie vs Coke; Oat Bites vs Lucky Charms; and Cliff Bar vs Peppermint Patty, among others.

When given the package image and nutritional label of the same products side by side, nearly three-quarters of the parents started to question whether healthy food could be inferred from packaging alone. More than 77% indicated they should look at nutritional labels more carefully in the future.

“Just because we believe from packaging and marketing that a product is healthy doesn’t mean it really is,” Dr Milanaik said. “We have to look at nutritional labels and avoid products that have what we call the health halo around them. It was a big wake-up for me as a parent of a diabetic, but also as a parent, period, to see some products I thought were intrinsically healthy not be any healthier than candy.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/colnihko