Messages from the Food Police: How Food-Related Warnings Backfire among Dieters

We have all seen messages from the “food police” telling us that sugary snacks are bad. But is it possible that seeing these messages actually make us more likely to eat sugary snacks? Researchers at Arizona State University, Nguyen Pham, Naomi Mandel, and Andrea Morales, show, in new research published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, that these messages backfire among dieters. They find that dieters ate 39% more cookies after seeing a “food police” style message that sa