Environment plays role in diet
How much candy satisfies your sweet tooth? It may depend on how big the scoop is, according to a study that shows that your surroundings may help you decide how much to eat.
Researchers call it "unit bias," the tendency to think that a single unit of food -- a bottle, a can, a plateful, or some more subtle measure -- is the right amount to eat or drink.
"Whatever size a banana is, that's what you eat, a small banana or a big banana," says Andrew Geier of the University of Pennsylvania in an Associated Press article. And "whatever's served on your plate, it just seems locked in our heads: that's a meal."
So what can we do to change the bias? Geier, whose work appears in the June issue of Psychological Science, says use smaller plates and when eating out, request that the meal be split in two in the kitchen, with half on the plate and the other half packaged to take home.
For more info, check out the full article.
-- Amanda Barrett, amNY.com
Comments
We have a culturally enforced ’consumption norm,’ which promotes both the tendency to complete eating a unit and the idea that a single unit is the proper amount to eat. When we talk about overeating and obesity, we talk calories consumed and grams of fat, but we rarely mention context and environment what people see as the acceptable amount to eat. This is a fundamental aspect of human food choice, which is seriously understudied considering its mammoth impact on the number of calories we consume every day.
Posted by: OD | November 4, 2006 7:01 AM
To test unit bias, the researchers left a bowl of M&M sweets in the hallway of an apartment building with a sign that read “Eat Your Fill: please use the spoon to serve yourself”. Some days they left a tablespoon-sized scoop, other days they left a quartercup scoop that was four times as big. Passers-by could obviously help themselves to as little or as much as they wanted regardless of which spoon was provided, but on average, 1.67 times more M&M’s were taken on the days the big scoop was left compared with the tablespoon-sized scoop.
Posted by: MA | December 10, 2006 2:59 PM