If you warn dieters how unhealthy a food is, they'll just eat more of it

The Huffington Post reports on research by Professors Naomi Mandel and Andrea Morales which found that negative messages about food did not help dieters make better choices.

New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene conducted a campaign against oversized sugary beverages in 2012 that attracted attention nationally. But do those scary ads help people make better food choices? Claudia McNeilly reported on research by Professors of Marketing Naomi Mandel and Andrea Morales in the Huffington Post’s Health Living blog. From The Huffington Post, February 20, 2015:

The study — conducted by researchers Nguyen Pham, Dr. Naomi Mandel and Dr. Andrea Morales — involved three rounds of testing, and each round revealed a similar conclusion. "We found that dieters increase their interest in and consume more unhealthy foods after seeing one-sided negative messages about healthy foods," Pham, the study's lead author, told Science of Us. This happens, she and her co-authors argue, because these messages make people "feel like their freedom to control their food choices is threatened." Their findings were published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.