Did you know that most people are affected by the names of food they eat? For example, people who were asked to compare a piece of “chocolate cake” with “Belgian Black Forest Double Chocolate Cake” said that the piece with the fancier name tasted better, even though they were from the exact same cake!

This information can be very helpful around the holidays!

Brian Wansink, Ph.D., the author of Mindless Eating — Why We Eat More Than We Think and the director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab gives some insightful advice about eating — and enjoying — healthy meals during this holiday season.

For Dr. Wansink the key is word association. He essentially makes the case that we can play a little mind game, by carefully choosing the words we use to describe the food we have prepared:

“You can trick them into eating more healthfully. Because reaction to food resides as much in our heads as in our mouths, if we believe a food is going to be delicious, we’re more likely to enjoy eating it. That’s why simply making the name of a food more descriptive or tantalizing can lead us to believe it is tastier.”

There’s actually a name for this strategy. It’s called “confirmation bias,”which just means that if someone describes a meal a certain way, it predisposes that reaction in our brains. For example, if someone calls a burrito “spicy,” the word “spicy” triggers that sensation so that when we eat it, we experience spicy.

Dr. Wansink conducted a study to test this theory. He gave the cafeteria participants six different meals on different days for six weeks. The same meals would reappear with different names. For example, one day a meal would be called “Red Beans and Rice.” A couple of weeks later, the exact same meal would be labeled, “Traditional Cajun Red Beans with Rice.” The same thing was done with all the other meals: fish, vegetables, chicken, beef, and desserts. Here’s my favorite example. Chocolate cake was offered one week as “Chocolate Cake” and as “Belgian Black Forest Double Chocolate Cake” another week.

What do you think happened when customers were asked to evaluate their meals?

“When diners were finished eating they were given a short survey asking them to rate the food. Foods with the fancy descriptive names were rated as more appealing and tastier than the identical foods with the less-enticing labels. The people eating the descriptive foods tended to think the dishes were ‘fantastic’ or ‘great menu items.’”

And how about that chocolate cake? “People will rate the Belgian cake as tasting better than an identical piece of plain old cake.” Isn’t that hilarious? It shows the power of words and the power of the mind!

So, here’s the plan: describe your meals in terms that you’d see in your favorite restaurant’s menu. Call your chicken “Tender Grilled Chicken” instead of “chicken” and your soup as “Grandma’s Chicken Soup” as opposed to “soup.” You and your family will enjoy the meal a whole lot better when you do!

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(Original photo by Steven Depolo, used under Creative Commons license.)