Can salads be bad for your health?

Salads. The name just sounds healthy. After all, what could be so bad about a bunch of vegetables in a bowl? Well, not so fast there, say the folks at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In a recent study, they rigged supermarket shopping carts with motion-tracking RFID tags, and what they found may surprise you.

After examining route data from over 1,000 shoppers, researchers uncovered a clear pattern: Putting a bunch of healthy food in your cart is just as likely to send you to the junk food and beer section as anything else. It appears the more “virtuous” your basket, the likelier you will be to make an exception for the “vice.”

Some of you may be thinking this is no surprise. After all, who hasn’t come home from a hard workout at the gym and rewarded themselves with a bowl of good ol’ Cookies & Cream? As it turns out, a growing body of research suggest the tendency towards a health tit-for-tat is deeply wired into the human psyche, likely operating on a subconscious level.

The underlying reason for this lies in balance. Most people have a very good concept of what is good and bad for them. So when the pendulum swings too far one way, we generally take action to balance it out — for better or for worse.

Even so, the course of our actions does seem to imply that even the mere presence of something good can trigger a justification for us to do something bad. One uncovered that people were more likely to order the least healthy food item off of a menu if said menu also had a healthy option; a fact not lost on McDonald’s when they rolled out salads next to their french fries.

So what does this mean for us? As health-conscious consumers, we’ve got to always be aware of our subconscious instincts. Don’t let that healthy salad drive you into the waiting arms of a greasy burger.