Guess what's on your plate: Testing potential correlates of nutrient (mis-)estimation

Fostering healthy dietary choices might be facilitated by a deeper understanding of nutrients, which also includes the ability to estimate energy and nutrient content accurately. In this study, we examined how good people were at estimating energy, carbohydrate, and sugar content of four different meals (i.e., typical, healthy, low-carb, low-sugar meal) self-served from a Fake Food buffet. Adding to and going beyond previous literature, we additionally focused on the relationship between people’s estimation abilities and personal (i.e., habitual eating behavior, general nutrition knowledge) as well as meal-related characteristics (i.e., meal size) as potential correlates. Data from 95 participants revealed that they were relatively accurate in estimating energy content, while they overestimated carbohydrates significantly across meals. Moreover, the data suggests that participants perceive overlaps in low-calorie and low-carb diets, as well as in low-carb and low-sugar diets. Yet, more research is needed to draw precise conclusions about perceived overlaps and to shed light on underlying mechanisms of overestimations. Interestingly, we did not find any clear pattern regarding personal characteristics as correlates of misestimations, but we found energy content misestimations to be more pronounced with increasing meal size. Overall, our study underlines once more that education about energy and nutrient content might be useful to foster healthy and balanced diets.