If you knew exactly how long it would take to sweat off that blueberry muffin on the elliptical, would you eat it? How about that thousand-calorie slice of cheesecake? Researchers have found ‘exercise labels’—posting how much exercise it takes to burn off the amount of calories in a food item—beat out calorie counts in steering hungry women away from junk food.
That’s right. Reading that a coke is 250 calories doesn’t cut it. But knowing it takes a whole 50 minutes of running to burn off the calories makes one think twice about a sugary midday drink.
In a study published last week in the American Journal of Public Health, scientists from the Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health observed that consumers where less likely to buy soda when they knew how much exercise it would take to burn it off. Basically, they were more swayed by the exercise than they were by simply reading the calorie content.
Do you think reading a menu full of exercise prescriptions would make you less apt to indulge?
