Have you ever told yourself that it’s OK to eat the broken cookies because all the calories have spilled out? At some point, many of us have convinced ourselves of something silly like that. We know it’s not true, but somehow it takes away some of the guilt of eating a cookie or two.

But sometimes, we think a food is healthy simply because of the marketing claims. That’s called the “health halo effect.” Say, for example, people are asked to taste two identical foods, but they’re told that one is organic and one isn’t. They’ll often say the “organic” one tastes better because they assume that organic food is of better quality.

It’s the same logic when someone orders a salad because they think it’s a healthy menu choice, no matter what’s on it. The word “salad” creates a health halo effect, even if the salad is loaded with bacon, cheese, eggs and a high-calorie, high-fat dressing. There’s lettuce under all that, so it must be healthy, right?

The salad is a fairly obvious example. Of course, all the additions lessen the healthiness of the salad, and most people recognize that. But, it’s not individual dishes that cause the most problems. It’s the marketing claims that create confusion and feed into people’s desire to eat healthy while eating the foods they most enjoy.

Eating low-fat was my first experience with marketing and the health halo effect, even if the term wasn’t around back in the late ’80s when low fat was the biggest dieting rule. My friends and I would eat entire chocolate cakes that were virtually fat-free, but they were full of sugar and chemicals. We ate huge bagels, dry — no butter or cream cheese for us. We loaded up on white flour while living by one simple rule: Fat causes fat. Fat-free cookies and cakes plus any kind of white bread were, in our minds, healthy.