Air date: May 17, 2009

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Lots of restaurants these days include "healthy choice" items on the menu. But a new study shows, weirdly, that listing healthy items actually encourages customers to order the least healthy foods.

Jeremy Shere has more.

So you're at McDonalds, or Burger King, waiting in line, gazing up at the menu. It's mainly hamburgers, and chicken sandwiches, and, of course, extra large French fries. But they also have some relatively healthy options, like salads, maybe a soup or two.

And the question is, amidst all the high-calorie, high-cholesterol meat and starch, how does the presence of a light, leafy salad affect what you actually end up ordering? Does it make you want to get a salad, because it's healthier?

To find out, I talked to Gavan Fitzimmons; he's a professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University. Gavan did this very interesting experiment where he showed people two fast food type menus -- one had three typically unhealthy options, and the other had the same three choices but also included a fourth, healthy option, a salad.

"More concerning, what we found was that when the salad was there, of the three unhealthy options, people were much more likely to choose the really, really unhealthy one when the salad was present versus when the salad wasn’t there."

In fact, when the salad was there on the menu, people were three times as likely to end up making the absolute least healthy choice. Why?

"Essentially what we found is that the presence of the healthy option, a salad for example in a fast food restaurant, it's actually fulfilling people's healthy eating goals. So we walk into that environment with the goal to eat healthy, we literally -- all we do is see the salad on the menu and all of a sudden that 'eat-healthy' goal gets satisfied."

So, basically, the lesson is -- if you’re trying to be healthy, don’t go to a fast food restaurant. Because odds are you’re going to end eating things that are bad for you, even if you could get a salad.

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about Gavan Fitzsimmons' research on psychology and nutrition from Duke University.

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