Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagal the nutrition diva here with your quick and dirty

tips for eating well and feeling fabulous. Joy emailed me this morning with a great question.

She's wondering how to gauge the healthfulness of the snacks she sees at natural food stores like Trader Joe's.

I bought some honey roasted sunflower seeds and some flaxseed cornships, she writes, thinking that these were somewhat healthy compared to Doritos anyway.

So does adding things like flaxseed to unhealthy things like cornchips make them more worthwhile? Does adding flavorings to seeds or

nuts make them less healthy? Joy, you put your finger right on a phenomenon called

the Health HALO effect. This is where people tend to

overestimate the nutritional value of a food that's labeled whole grain or gluten-free

or they underestimate the negative impact of a food just because it contains a healthful ingredient like flaxseed.

My favorite illustration of the Health HALO effect is an experiment that John Tierney did last year in Brooklyn.

He stopped a bunch of people on the street, showed them a photograph of a meal and

asked them to estimate how many calories the meal contained. Now the photo showed a typical meal from a

chain restaurant, one of those crunchy Asian chicken salads and a soda.

On average, people estimated that the meal contained about a thousand calories,

which was a little high. It actually contained a little over 900 calories.

Then he stopped a bunch more people and he showed them a photo of the

same salad and the same soda plus two crackers that were labeled trans fat-free. And get this, the average calorie estimate for the meal with the

crackers was about 800 calories. 200 calories less than the average estimate for

the same meal without the crackers.

This, despite the fact that the crackers actually added 100 calories to the meal.

The Health Halo conferred by three little words, Trans Fat Free, not only canceled out the calories and the crackers themselves,

it erased a hundred calories from the salad sitting next to them, at least in people's minds.

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