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Food illusions: why we eat more than we think - Cover Story
Nutrition Action Healthletter, March, 2004 by Brian Wansink
Why are two out of three Americans overweight? We're moving less and eating more. Food is cheap, at our fingertips, and calorie-heavy.
Restaurant meals typically have at least 1,000 calories, not including dessert or drinks. Three square meals a day has morphed into two or three feasts sandwiched between several meal-sized snacks.
And we're not even aware of it. Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at the University of Illinois, has spent a career studying what consumers don't notice. The size of a package, the shape of a glass, the words on a menu or label, our proximity to food, and other invisible influences can determine how much of what we eat, according to his research.
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Here's how to spot--and sidestep--the eating pressure that slips below the radar.
Q: Why worry about what makes us eat a few extra calories?
A: If we ate 100 fewer calories each day, instead of gaining 10 pounds at the end of a year, maybe we'd lose 10 pounds. Small factors that we're not even aware of add 100, 200, 400 calories. My studies examine when that happens and when it doesn't.
Q: Don't most people watch what they eat?
A: Many of us are reasonably diligent about what we eat but we don't put that much thought into how much we eat. People may decide to eat Chinese food instead of pizza or fruit instead of potato chips because they're healthier. But once they make that initial choice, they tend to not monitor how much they eat. And a pound of grapes isn't calorie-free.
Package Size
Q: Do larger portions make us eat more?
A: Yes. We went to movie theaters in Chicago and randomly gave people either medium or really large buckets of popcorn. We found out that the people who were given big buckets are roughly 50 percent more than the people who were given smaller buckets. But if you asked them to estimate how many ounces or calories they had eaten, there was no difference between what the two groups reported.
Q: We just don't notice?
A: That's right. To see how automatic this behavior is, we gave Philadelphia moviegoers medium or large buckets of stale, 14-day-old popcorn that tasted terrible.
The people who got the large buckets ate 31 percent more than the people who got the medium buckets. And, again, both groups thought they had eaten the same amount of popcorn.
Q: Is it a clean-your-plate mentality?
A: That may be at work in some cases, but it goes much deeper.
We sent people home with two-pound, one-pound, or half-pound bags of M&Ms and a videotape. We wanted to see how much they ate while watching the tape. As soon as they finished watching, we picked up the video and the M&M bags.
We found that people who were given the smaller bag averaged 63 M&Ms, but it increased to about 120 M&Ms with the one-pound bag and even more with the two-pound bag. That can't be a clean-your-plate phenomenon because no one can finish that large a bag of M&Ms without needing insulin.
Q: Have you tested other foods?
A: Yes. If you give people a larger package, they'll pour more whether it's M&Ms, dog food, cat food, plant food, non-food items, anything.
Q: If it's not clean-your-plate, what is it?
A: We think the size of a package or a portion gives people a perceptual consumption cue as to what's acceptable, or normal. We even did a study where we gave people either a big or a medium box of spaghetti, and we took half of the spaghetti out of the big box so that both boxes had the same amount of spaghetti. People still ended up using more from the big box.
Q: And we don't realize when we eat more?
A: No. We designed this refillable soup bowl by drilling holes through a cafeteria table and running tubing from the bowls to a pot of hot soup in the next room. We brought in four people at a time. Two were eating out of the bowls that refilled so slowly that it was imperceptible, and two were eating out of regular bowls.
Women with the refillable bowls ate 30 percent more and men are 40 percent more. But when we asked them afterwards how much they had eaten, they estimated the same number of ounces and calories as people eating from the normal bowls.
Q: Do people eat more at all-you-can-eat buffets?
A: We haven't looked, but we have found that the more people pay for these buffets, the more they eat. They want to get their money's worth. And the more they eat, the lower they rate the food.
Q: Why?
A: I think that if you eat and eat, your satisfaction from the food goes down, and that's what you remember. The owner of a famous Japanese restaurant said that when people leave the restaurant, they should be satisfied, but not full. Then you really appreciate what you've just eaten, even if it's the last course, because you're just as hungry and eager to eat it as the first course.
Shapes
Q: What other cues make us eat more?
A: We looked at whether the shape of glasses unknowingly influences how much we eat. We went to health and fitness camps where kids go to lose weight over the summer. These people are pretty diligent. They're taught portion control, calorie counting, and calorie estimation.
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