Eat Well for Less

I am fascinated by Eat Well For Less, an undemanding BBC1 television programme in which Gregg Wallace (him from Masterchef) and Chris Bavin (who I’ve not seen before) show how a family can save money from their weekly shop. Usually the advice works along the lines of buy own-brand labels, and don’t buy prepared food, and the results can often be a saving of 60-70 each week.

I’m not always sure how much they really save. Sometimes in order to make the savings as shown, the families need to shop at four different supermarkets - clearly that’s unlikely to happen (you’d spend more on petrol than you would save).

But I’m mainly interested in the taste tests. Most of the time, it turns out that the families cannot tell the difference between branded food and own-brand food. And it turns out that they can save a significant amount of money by swapping from Coke to a supermarket’s own brand.

But...

Studies have shown that there’s more to our perception (including taste) than just the taste sensation. Pepsi beats Coke in a blind taste test, but Coke beats Pepsi when people know what they are drinking.

From what I can tell, nobody is exactly sure why. I’ve seen a couple of theories. One theory suggests that Pepsi is slightly sweeter than Coke, which helps it in the taste tests. But that extra sweetness is its undoing in the long run as most people don’t want to guzzle litres of something very sweet.

However, I think my preferred theory is more about identity (and marketing). When you drink a Coke, you are buying into the Coke ideal, as promoted in all those sun-kissed adverts filled with beautiful people. Drinking a Coke makes you feel good, more so than drinking a Pepsi.

Which is why I think that it’s harder to give up something like Coke, if that’s what you drink. It would be like giving up on your identity.

I suspect the link is less strong for something like canned tomatoes.

I’d be really interested to see Eat Well For Less revisit the families to see what the long-term changes are, but I’ve a feeling that’s outside the scope of the programme.

Do placebos work if you don't believe in them?

Yesterday I watched the glucosamine trial on BBC's Trust Me, I'm a Doctor (which I saw on iPlayer) with interest as I am currently taking glucosamine for a bit of joint pain in my knees.

The detailed trial results are here, but the essence is that 50% of the trial group did a simple strengthening exercise (with 80% success rate), the other half of the trial took a supplement (with 55% success rate).

55% is still pretty good, but at the end of the trial it was revealed that the supplement was in fact a sugar pill - a placebo. They weren't taking glucosamine at all.

So I then wondered about the supplement half of the trial. Did their joint pain immediately come back, now that they knew that they had been taking a placebo? Or did it stay away?

The programme didn't answer that, but a quick Google search revealed this article in the Guardian, which talks about research that placebos seem to work even when patients know they're taking a placebo.

(I also found this article criticising the study on the grounds that because the subjects were told that placebos have a powerful effect, they were lied to and effectively manipulated into believing that they would - and as a result the placebo effect kicked in.)

Which makes me wonder what's going on. It seems clear to me that there's something psychological going on, but is a case of "This nice man in a position of authority is telling me that this sugar pill works, therefore it will."? Or maybe "Because I am doing something about my pain I am therefore getting better."

Or is it something else?

One thing I haven't seen is whether placebos work if you don't believe in them. So for that 45% of the trial, why didn't it work for them? Was it because the pain was too intense, or was there something else going on?

(As for me, I'm trying the exercises as I'd rather not take a supplement if I don't need to. We'll see how that goes.)