What's the best way to boost french fry purchases?

According to new academic research, add a salad to the menu. The control group was shown picture menus with only junk food, setting a baseline for the amount of fries ordered. Then a side salad was added to the menu.

Some people ordered the salad, but many more now ordered the fries, though they had passed on them earlier! It's almost as if, have considered and rejected the salad, they now felt it would be okay to indulge in their favorite.

What are the implications of this research for investment advisors, and what they present to their clients?

Depressingly, the conclusion of the researchers in this study is that expanding choice is bad, given that the "wrong" food then gets chosen more.

Schools and other establishments concerned with promoting healthy behaviors may need to take an extreme approach and eliminate all unhealthy food, Fitzsimons said. "It sounds quite drastic, but because the effect of mixing healthy and unhealthy choices is so powerful, we would suggest that the safest way to get children to eat well is to take the pizza, fries and other junk foods completely out of schools, and replace them with healthy foods."

Just what we need, more government nannyism.