People Misjudge the Amount of Sugar in Foods – Limited Information Can Already Help
Together with her colleagues Annalena Loose and Barbara Kreis, Dr. Julia Groß, academic staff member in the team of Edgar Erdfelder, senior professor of Cognitive Psychology, has conducted an experimental study on the knowledge about the sugar content of foods. The researchers wanted to find out how good people are at estimating the amount of sugar and if a short intervention helps to improve the correctness of their estimates.
“In the first part of the study, we asked the 160 participants to estimate the sugar content of certain foods and drinks,” explains Groß the structure of the online experiment. “Surprisingly, the participants estimated the sugar content of individual foods as being much higher than it actually was. We expected them to underestimate the sugar content since most people eat too much sugar.” Groß suspects that the population's knowledge about how much sugar one should consume per day and which products contain how much of it is currently still very limited.