Would You Like Your Veggies Plain or Succulent?

Here’s a recipe to encourage your family to eat more vegetables: Just add adjectives.

Adding a few tantalizing words can dramatically increase the appeal of a food, writes Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, in a new column on the MSNBC Web site. Dr. Wansink, author of the popular book “Mindless Eating,” says tasty descriptors help condition reluctant eaters to accept new foods. The trick of using sensory words like “tender,” “succulent” and “velvety'’ to describe foods is called “confirmation bias,” he says.

“If you say something is juicy, people almost unconsciously turn up their ‘juicy sensors’ when they taste the food,'’ he writes. “Once these taste sensors are activated, people become preprogrammed to think a dish tastes good.'’

The idea is backed up by research. At the Cornell lab, Dr. Wansink and his colleagues offered six different foods to cafeteria diners on different days for six weeks — but they changed the names. Sometimes they served “red beans and rice” and “seafood fillet.” Other days they served “Traditional Cajun Red Beans With Rice” and “Succulent Italian Seafood Fillet.”

After eating, diners rated the foods. Foods with fancier names were rated as more appealing and tastier than the identical foods with the less enticing labels, he says.

For children, choose fun words to describe new foods. Dr. Wansink says that in his research, he’s seen preschoolers devour broccoli because they were pretending to be dinosaurs eating a “Dinosaur Tree,'’ while kids couldn’t get enough of a tomato-based vegetable juice dubbed a “Rainforest Smoothie.'’ When regular peas were renamed “power peas,” the number of children who ate them doubled, he says.