An interruption in the regular programming for some breaking nutrition news

I was actually in the process of writing Dr. Yoni Freedhoff about an article that I read in the latest issue of the Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research when I thought, "Hey, why should I give him all the credit?" So even though I really want to share with you the details of my recent New York and Montreal trip, I'm going to interrupt that series of posts to share this article with you.

The article is called Meanings That Youth Associate with Healthy and Unhealthy Food, and it's a study done by Michelle Harrison and Lois Jackson of the Health Promotion Program at Dalhousie University. They recruited 13 teens aged 13-15, and did interviews as well as a card-sorting activity with them to find out their attitudes about healthy foods vs. unhealthy foods.

What really interested me were the results of the card sorting activity, where each child was given 52 cards with pictures of food on them and they were asked to sort them into "healthy" and "unhealthy" piles. Some of the participants (though the authors didn't say how many) ended up also making an "in-between" pile.

Some highlights:

The dairy industry is definitely going to pat itself on its back because most of the kids put all of the cards that had pictures of milk and alternatives (except Cheez Whiz) into the healthy pile. This includes 10 of 13 kids classifying chocolate milk as "healthy" or "in between" (despite the fact that there's 13 g (about a tablespoon) of added sugar per cup in addition to the 13 g of sugar that's naturally occurring in milk) and 8 of 13 kids classifying whole milk (8 g of fat per cup, 5 of them saturated) as "healthy".

The authors also noted that the "in between" group consisted of "nutritionally-enhanced products (NEPs)" (i.e. low-fat, low-sugar, low-salt products), saying that some of the subjects commented that "The food in its original form was thought to be unhealthy, but when the 'bad' part of the food (e.g., fat) was removed, this did not necessarily transform the food into a healthy food. Some aruged that the "bad" components were replaced by another ingredient that was just as unhealthy." In addition, "healthy" foods were associated with being "natural" and "unprocessed", and vice versa for "unhealthy" foods.

You might be thinking, "Hey, smart kids for not getting tricked by the food industry." but the card-sorting activity tells another story. Here is how they classified the NEPs and the original products (if available) that were in the cards:

Foods	Healthy	In between	Unhealthy
Bacon	2	0	11
Low-salt bacon	3	2	8
Chips	0	1	12
Low-fat potato chips	6	3	4
Pop	0	1	12
Diet Pop	3	2	8
Low-fat chocolate chip muffins	6	2	5
Low-fat chocolate pudding	5	2	6
Low-fat crackers	8	2	3
Low-fat popcorn	8	2	3
Reduced-salt pretzels	2	3	8
Sugar-free Kool-Aid	4	3	6

So I guess our kids aren't as smart as we thought they were after all, but it's interesting to see that they don't really see removing salt as making something "healthier".

What was also interesting (but pretty easy to relate to) in the study was the idea that healthy foods were for when you're with family, whereas unhealthy foods are for when you're hanging out with friends. Some went as far as saying that they eat unhealthy foods in front of friends because they're afraid of getting teased, but at the same time, girls tend to eat healthy foods in front of boys to avoid looking like "pigs".

Oh, teenage drama.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty neat study that shows that teens are conscious of healthy vs. unhealthy foods, but other factors influence their food choice. What's troubling is that they hold some of their beliefs as to a food that is "healthy", aren't really as healthy as they think, and it's likely that it's not just teens who think that way. A lot of health professionals have been saying this for a long time, but we need better nutrition education for the public without the message getting muddled by the food industry.