Graphic Food Management
Making use of graphic images of healthy food could be one powerful way of weaning overweight children off junk food and onto healthier options.
Children are influenced more by the things they see than what they read or what is told them, so making use of popular social Internet sites like Pinterest and diet related boards at pinterest.com can certainly do a lot of good in that area.
They certainly will help to increase awareness that healthy food can also look--and by association--taste great.
The whole idea is to get children to "like" healthy meals and one of the best ways to do that is to get them to "discover" for themselves great looking, healthy dishes that are put up on sites such as Pinterest.
This approach uses the kind of psychology that is effective when children are not forced to do something but instead do it for themselves.
Attractive Images of Food
It's a case of getting one back at the advertisers of junk food in billboard posters that make those unhealthy hamburgers look so tempting to kids. When they find some amazing looking images of great meals on Pinterest, it doesn't register whether those meals might be healthy or not, they just look amazing and therefore in the associative process they must taste great too!
Advertisers know only too well that using highly desirable looking images of whatever food they are contracted to make highly saleable work by pressing all the right buttons in a consumers head and triggering that sense of wanting that we all possess.
"It doesn't matter that when you get to the fast food restaurant that may be selling that tasty looking hamburger you just saw screaming "EAT ME!" on a poster on the side of a bus it doesn't look as good as the image you're holding in your brain. We are programmed to want it anyway, because the image is still firmly implanted in our brains so we expect the hamburger to taste as great as we imagined it would."
Turning the Tables
The very same psychology can be used in reverse to get children to desire a really amazing looking dish they saw on Pinterest. When the image of the meal looks so good it registers in the subconscious that it must taste as good as it looks, then you're onto a winner.
That's because it doesn't matter if there are hated vegetables like maybe carrots or zucchini in there, the overall image looked so tasty that those prejudices can even be overcome with very clever imaging.
Getting kids to override an ingrained habit for eating processed junk food and believing it tastes so great by introducing an even more "tasty looking" graphic image of a healthy meal is not necessarily going to be easy thing to do. But that doesn't mean it will be impossible.
On the contrary, it could turn out to be an interesting process for a graphic designer to prove how good they are by presenting an image of a healthy meal that makes a junk food addicted kid think it will taste better than their usual fare of unhealthy junk. It would certainly be worth the effort when it works! You can read more about food and weight management here: www.choosemyplate.gov.