Truth in Barcodes, People Lie About their Health Related Behaviors

New ground breaking research from one of Tuck’s marketing professors will have a huge impact on the international diabetes/obesity epidemic and will change how doctors teach diabetic patients to eat after diagnosis. Professor Kusum Ailawadi’s cutting edge research used a scanner to track grocery store purchases and the study monitored purchases by 40,000 households during a four-year period before and after a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. Although patients tend to eat less sugar, they actually ingest more fat and calories by overeating what they perceive to be healthier choices. If you‘d like to chat more with Kusum on her research for a future story on obesity, eating habits or diabetes, we’d be thrilled to connect you. I’ve included some links to an article highlighting her research in our recent issue of the Tuck Forum, our quarterly faculty research publication: Truth in Barcodes. The full study, “Soda versus Cereal and Sugar versus Fat: Drivers of Healthful Food Intake and the Impact of Diabetes Diagnosis,” is published in the May issue of the Journal of Marketing - an abstract of the paper can be found here. She would be happy to do an interview and when I asked her for a statement she wrote, “Our grocery shopping reveals the truth about the food we eat, more accurately and honestly than we are able or willing to ourselves. And the truth is very worrisome. Consumers, even those who are self-controlled, and certainly those who have obesity related diseases like diabetes, are not making the dietary changes they need to. If we are going to make a dent in the rising epidemic of obesity and diabetes, doctors and nutritionists have to advise their patients in radically different ways, and marketers of packaged foods have to stop pricing their least unhealthy products at a premium”.