Those ‘Low-Calorie” sections that are increasingly popping up in restaurant menus, according to a new study appear to have a backfire effect.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, placing low-calorie dishes into their own low-calorie category can cause consumers to instead choose higher calorie meals that could be making them fatter.

To Jeffrey Parker, an assistant professor of marketing at Georgia State University, the restaurant menu provides the perfect conditions for testing decision-making. When the Build Your Own Salad menus in New York began making an appearance in every corner deli, he had to wonder how that could affect consumer choice. Then, New York mandated calorie postings for restaurants with franchises of 15 or more locations.

‘And everyone was well, is that actually helping people make choices?” he asked. Together with Donald R. Lehmann, a Columbia Business professor, Parker hypothesized that placing calories next to dishes didn’t really help people make healthier choices and placing all those low-calorie dishes in their own section helps even less.

‘For a lot of people low-cal, healthy things kind of sound like not very big, […]