It can be hard to resist a juicy burger and fries, especially for college students.
But if you knew what you were actually shoveling into your mouth, would you still eat it?
Jason Abaluck, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tried to answer this question on Monday in an MIT presentation about nutrition labels, public health and McDonald's.
"This is a food that some people eat," Abaluck told the audience of about 50, as a picture of the McDonald's Big Mac appeared on a projection.
Though health professionals say that eating foods like the Big Mac, or "monster burger," as Abaluck called it, is bad for your health, people still choose to eat many unhealthy foods.
For many people, the taste of a juicy Big Mac seems more important than its 540 calories and limited nutritional value, Abuluck said.
"People value taste more than they dislike the health consequences of eating that food," Abaluck said, an attitude that many of the attendees shared.
"If I'm hungry, I'll just buy it," said Adam Sacarny, an MIT graduate student. "I wouldn't care if it was unhealthy or not."
This is a common mentality among many people, Abaluck explained. However, while they may not care about whether what they eat is considered healthy, most people do want to live long and healthy lives.
"People who don't seem to care [about nutrition labels] do care about their life expectancy," Abaluck said. "The vast majority of people do care how long they will live but don't conceptually map their health choices."
Many audience members agreed that one of the main problems in consciously choosing to eat healthier is that nutritional labels are often too overwhelming and too complicated to decipher.
"It's too time consuming to read all of the nutritional facts on labels," Sacarny said. "Nutritional labels should provide people with basic nutritional facts that they actually want to know."
"Labels are too confusing. Other labels that are easier to read and understand should be made," said Vanessa Teutsdilander, a student from University of Applied Science in Germany.
"People do need to recognize if foods are unhealthy," she added.
Teutsdilander, who is studying nutrition, explained that in places such as Denmark, new forms of nutritional labels are being implemented that are easier to understand.
"For nutrients like sugar and fat, the label is colored red for high and green for low," she said.
"It's a really cool idea!"
Many attendees said they thought using more colorful visuals would make looking at nutritional labels more appealing and easier to understand.
If more techniques like these were integrated into nutritional labels, many said they would make healthier choices.
However, human nature still should not be discounted.
"I do use labels, but if I feel like having a burger, I have a burger," Teutsdilander said.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
