Bradley P. Turnwald

Who they are

Public Health Post describes him as a postdoctoral scholar in behavioural science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with a PhD in social psychology from Stanford University, and says his research on motivation examines how modern culture shapes unhelpful beliefs about healthy eating. Stanford News described him in 2017 as a graduate psychology student working with Alia Crum, who directs the Stanford Mind & Body Lab. These descriptions are dated and may have changed.

This page carries no further biography.

Key papers

Turnwald, B. P., Boles, D. Z., & Crum, A. J. (2017). Association between indulgent descriptions and vegetable consumption: Twisted carrots and dynamite beets. JAMA Internal Medicine, 177(8), 1216. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.1637.

Key ideas

Indulgent labels raised vegetable selection. Over one academic quarter of 46 days, with preparation and presentation unchanged, indulgent labels made diners 25 per cent more likely to take the vegetable than basic labels, 35 per cent more than healthy positive labels and 41 per cent more than healthy restrictive labels. The mass served was 23 per cent higher than under the basic label. See descriptive food names.

What the study left open. It covered one dining hall and vegetables only, and the authors flagged that ordering from a menu without seeing the food remains untested.

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