Tens, Hundreds or Thousands? How Nutritional Information Numerosity Nonconsciously Affects Unhealthy Food Choices

Obesity is a growing problem in many areas around the globe. It is particularly an issue in the United States where nearly two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese (Flegal et al., 2012). In response to this epidemic, both government and industry organizations have initiated programs to make nutritional information more available to consumers. The underlying assumption behind these efforts is that by giving consumers more information they will make healthier food choices. However, the results of these initial efforts appear to be inconclusive (Elbel et al., 2009). Thus, a greater understanding of how nutritional information influences food consumption is necessary. When consumers read the nutritional content of a food item, they are often confronted with numbers in variety of different unit sizes. For instance, a food’s fat content is often a single digit or a double digit number, whereas caloric content can be as large as a four digit number. In Europe, energy content (i.e., joules) can be as large as a five digit number. With both types of information, consumers often try to limit the quantity consumed to stay within a desired daily limit. However, it is possible that the unit size of nutritional content can influence how healthy consumers perceive a food item to be?