The bottomless appetite

hiake · Oct 17, 2007

The bottomless appetite

By Terri Coles

TORONTO, Oct 11 (Reuters) Some diet experts say that eating a bowl of soup before a meal can help keep the calories down, but the latest Ig Nobel prize winner believes appetite is in the eye of the beholder.

Every October, scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research presents 10 Ig Nobel prizes at Harvard to researchers whose scientific achievements both engage and entertain. Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University and author of "Mindless Eating" , won this year's prize in nutrition for a study showing that people eat nearly 75 percent more soup, without realizing it, if eating from a specially-rigged "bottomless" bowl.

Wansink's prize-winning research showed that people "eat" with their eyes instead of their stomach, using visual cues like the amount of soup left in a bowl to determine when they are full. When those visual cues are skewed -- for example, if a bowl of soup never goes empty, no matter how much a person eats -- we can end up consuming a lot more calories than we realize.

Despite its humorous origins, most winners are honored to be Ig Nobel prize recipients, Wansink said, pointing out that much of the selected research has been published in respected, peer-reviewed journals.

"You can be pretty confident about something your peers say is an incredible contribution when somebody else takes it at a different angle and finds the humor in it," he said. "It's a lot easier to take than if it wouldn't have been accepted in the first place."

Wansink and his colleagues initially examined how people determine fullness in other studies where testers were told to dish out what they wanted to eat, but then were given 25 or 50 percent more food without their knowledge.

When Wansink asked college students when they'd stop eating if given an 18-ounce bowl of soup, 81 percent said they'd go by a visual reference point, such as when the bowl was empty, while 19 percent said they'd stop when they felt full.

With this in mind, a different experiment was developed: four people would sit at a table for 20 minutes, each eating from an 18-ounce bowl of tomato soup. The catch was that two of the bowls would never get empty, thanks to tubing running from the bowls to a six-quart vat of soup hidden under the tables.

The volunteers who ate from normal bowls consumed about nine ounces of soup, just less than a can. They thought they ate 123 calories, but actually ate 155. Those with the bottomless bowls estimated that they ate almost the same number of calories -- 127 -- but had actually eaten an average of 268 calories and 15 ounces of soup. They'd ingested 73 percent more soup, but almost none reported feeling full because in their minds they'd only finished half the bowl.

Despite eating so much more soup, only two of the volunteers with bottomless bowls figured out what was going on: one who saw the tubing when he bent down to retrieve a dropped napkin, and another who forgot his manners and lifted his bowl up to his lips. It's not that surprising that almost nobody figured out the catch in the 20 minutes the experiments ran, Wansink said.

"When we eat, we don't just eat and stare at our food, he explained. Typically, we're multitasking with something else, whether it be reading or watching TV or talking to the people we're with." When we're distracted, it's easy to stop paying attention to how much we're actually eating.

Several of Wansink's other studies show that when we're asked to estimate exactly how much we're eating, we don't do a very good job. The recently released "McSubway" study showed that restaurants like Subway have a "health halo" that caused diners to significantly underestimate the number of calories in their meals, even if they were still less overall than at a traditional fast food restaurant like McDonald's. Wansink's research on how package size affects how much we consume is reflected in the popular 100-calorie serving sizes for snack foods like chips and chocolate bars.

His papers always include carefully controlled lab studies that will stand up to journal scrutiny, Wansink said, but he also tries to do field work with real people in real environments. "We don't need to do that to get it published in the journal, he said, but that seems to be the thing that makes it memorable." The field studies illustrate the results found in the lab, and those studies are the ones that people are more likely to recognize themselves in, he said.

The Ig Nobels can help to bridge the divide between academics and the general population, Wansink said; when the prize-winning research is really looked at, you can see the relevance it has to everyday life. The awards may also serve as an inspiration to people considering a career in science, he added, by showing them that scientific research can be fun and serious.

Wansink said he is not bothered that, although the awards are presented by past Nobel Prize winners, no Ig Nobel winner has also won the better-known honor. After his win was announced, he received an email from a colleague who had caught the end of a radio news story and wasn't sure exactly which prize he'd received.

"That's one of the cool benefits of doing this," Wansink said. Not only do you get to hang out with a bunch of real Nobel Prize winners, but you also have your less attentive colleagues thinking that you've got one."

Source: http://features.us.reuters.com/wellbeing/news/1009ED16-78C8-11DC-82D1-90216240.html
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Is that why we should always use smaller sized dishes? We would tell ourselves to "feel full" when we see empty dishes -tongue2

Taxloss · Oct 17, 2007

I my case I certainly need smaller sized dishes as I always eat till my plate/bowl is empty because I've always been taught that kids in the Third World countries are starving which is why I'm not allowed to waste any food. -sweat

hiake · Oct 17, 2007

Taxloss said: ↑

I my case I certainly need smaller sized dishes as I always eat till my plate/bowl is empty because I've always been taught that kids in the Third World countries are starving which is why I'm not allowed to waste any food. -sweat
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Waste not, want not... It's a virtue (by my book anyways)

I just end up cooking smaller meals and take loads of munchies in between meals -tongue2

Taxloss · Oct 17, 2007

hiake said: ↑

Waste not, want not... It's a virtue (by my book anyways)

I just end up cooking smaller meals and take loads of munchies in between meals -tongue2
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If I cook (or attempt to) I always end up making more portions than I originally had in mind. (too little water for the soup? I'll add more...but it gets to watery....so I add up more ingredients/soup base...and it's too much so I have to add some more water again lol) -sweat

hiake · Oct 17, 2007

Taxloss said: ↑

If I cook (or attempt to) I always end up making more portions than I originally had in mind. (too little water for the soup? I'll add more...but it gets to watery....so I add up more ingredients/soup base...and it's too much so I have to add some more water again lol) -sweat
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Then I would set the extra aside for lunch the next day... for the weeks to come -tongue2

The bottomless appetite

hiake Vardøgr of da E.Twin

Taxloss Stripper Vicar

hiake Vardøgr of da E.Twin

Taxloss Stripper Vicar

hiake Vardøgr of da E.Twin