Adding a pleasant odour to food and beverage nutrition labels might make the products be perceived as healthier. Yum.
Delicious, aromatic labels could be the next frontier in public health, suggest the findings of a new German study.
The boffins at the very German-sounding Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging looked at the fMRI scans of 63 people as they were asked to read and sniff 20 drink labels.
There were two flavoured drinks in question – one chocolate and one mango.
Each drink had five alternate labels with different statements regarding its healthiness, and each variation was presented to participants once without a chocolate or mango odour and once with an odour.
The odours were matched to the drink label; i.e. chocolate smell went with chocolate drink label, mango smell went with mango drink label.
After each smelling/reading session, study participants were asked to rate the perceived odour intensity and pleasantness, their willingness to buy the product and how healthy they thought it was.
It’s not known whether any of the participants were allowed to take a sip of the mysterious drinks post-rating.
According to the results, which were published in The Journal of Neuroscience this week, the willingness to buy the product was significantly higher with a scented label and the scented-label products were often perceived as healthier.
On the brain side, the smelly labels were associated with significantly increased activity in brain regions which process odours (makes sense) and also the parts that process labels (interesting).
“The amygdala, part of both the olfactory pathway and the limbic system, plays a crucial role in emotional processing of olfactory stimuli but also for emotional regulation, associative learning, and decision-making, including food choices based on labels,” the researchers wrote.
“Depending on the food attribute emphasised on the label, the amygdala codes taste pleasantness or health costs.”
There were no correlations between brain activity and general nutrition knowledge.
Taken together, the basic findings were that olfactory stimulation can modulate activity in the brain regions associated with label processing and might also modulate the way it encodes information related to reward systems and decision-making.
The practical implication here, according to the authors, is that this could finally be a way to make people pay attention to nutrition labels.
Our tiny brains aren’t so hard to fool, after all.
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