Does Nutrition Labeling Lead To Healthier Eating?

Nutrient labeling is found to significantly affect consumer purchase behavior; some evidence that consumers may act as if they hold nutrient (or health risk) budgets is found. Providing nutrient information may allow consumers to more easily switch consumption away from "unhealthy" products in those food categories where differences in other quality characteristics (e.g., taste) are relatively small between the more and less "healthy" products, toward "unhealthy" products in categories where differences may be relatively large (i.e., a "substitution effect"). If this substitution effect is large, nutrient labeling may not change the overall consumption of "unhealthy" nutrients and thus may not lead to significant changes in health risk.