Hoping to get junior to eat his broccoli? Don’t call it broccoli. Call it dinosaur broccoli trees. That’s the advice offered at the annual meeting of the School Nutrition Association in Washington D.C. this week.

When a group of four-year-olds were offered “X-ray vision carrots” instead of garden variety carrots, they ate almost twice the amount with their school lunches. “Cool names can make for cool foods,” said the lead author of the report, Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food & Brand Lab. Kids continued to eat more carrots even on days when they weren’t labeled with space-age names.

The same effect works on adults–the reason Whoppers are called Whoppers and Big Gulps are called Big Gulps. A related experiment at a restaurant found that when the standard seafood filet was re-named “succulent italian seafood filet,” the eatery sold 28 percent more of the item. Not only that, customers gave it a 12 percent better rating. “Same food, but different expectations, and a different experience,” said Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

Maybe the same technique could work in reverse. Instead of calling that dessert “triple rich chocolate mousse,” call it “fat thighs fudge.” Care for a piece?

Tags: children, names, vegetables