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Healthy food choices and the ‘light conundrum’

In this video, Professor Nico HEUVINCK speaks about his research on the way people make healthy food choices. According to the expert, people take around 200 food-related decisions each day. However, less than 15% of these are made consciously. Therefore, people often use mental shortcuts when it comes to choosing food.

03/15/2023

3 min

Consumers often buy or see healthy versions of ‘regular’ food products which have a “Light” label. This is used to describe lower levels of calories, sodium or fat. However, light also has another more literal meaning: low in weight. Nico HEUVINCK and his co-authors decided to study whether consumers may unconsciously link these two meanings – for example by associating products that weigh less as being healthier and vice versa.

More information is available in their paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology “The Light = Healthy Intuition” (April 2022), Yi Li (Macquarie University), Nico Heuvinck and Mario Pandelaere (Virginia Tech University).

Nico Heuvinck is Professor of Marketing & Academic Director of the Master in Digital Marketing & CRM at IÉSEG. He has a Ph.D. in Marketing from Ghent University (Belgium). Nico is an expert in consumer behavior and investigates various consumer psychology related phenomena such as: consumer lay beliefs in healthy food decision making; the role of sensory marketing and store atmospherics in retail settings; how consumers react to algorithmic versus human decision-making and biases; the drivers of ethical perceptions of brands, and the role of two-sided advertising in marketing communication.

His research has been published in leading international marketing journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the International Journal of Advertising and featured in different international media including Harvard Business Review and The Times.