A Big Fat Crisis (9 page)

Because eating is second only to breathing as a critical survival behavior, it tends to be more automatic and more automatically stimulated than any other behavior we engage in. That’s why eating is not a rational behavior. It’s not an advanced cognitive behavior like studying for a test, memorizing facts, understanding and manipulating sophisticated mathematical equations, painting a portrait, or writing a book. It’s a primitive one: instinctual, hardwired, and in many ways uncontrollable. The desire to eat can be easily triggered just by an image flashing as we drive by (the billboard depicting the juicy burger, the neon sign shaped like an ice cream cone), or even by sounds we associate with food (the rustle of candy wrappers, the pop of a soda can tab). Even if we have insight into these triggers, we may not be able to resist them. We can easily be influenced to eat too much.

The Triggers All Around Us

For most everyday behaviors, automaticity plays a much larger role than is generally appreciated, and cues, signs, symbols, situations—in fact, most of what goes on around us—trigger automatic behavioral responses. In the 1960s psychologist Roger Barker developed the concept of “behavioral settings,” the idea that the environment guides individual behavior. He noted that two different people’s behaviors are more similar in one setting than one person’s behavior is in two different settings.
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For example, when two people are sitting in a classroom at 10 a.m., they will probably behave similarly, quietly listening to the instructor. But the attentive behavior of one of those individuals at 10 a.m. in the classroom compared to the same individual’s behavior at 9 p.m. in a dance hall—when she is moving around the floor vigorously, shaking her hips and arms, singing with the music—couldn’t be more different. The settings we are in dictate our behaviors more than we do ourselves.

The food environment sets expectations and guides behavior based upon the availability and presentation of food. For example, nearly all people automatically eat more when they are served more.
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This phenomenon has been proven with hundreds of people of multiple age groups and types—children, adolescents, college students, adults, thin people, and fat people—and in both laboratory settings and natural settings such as restaurants.
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In each experiment, all the available food is first measured, then the food that remains after eating is subtracted to calculate exactly how much participants consumed.
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In a food consumption study of thirty four-year-olds, not only was the usual food weighing done, but researchers also counted how many bites the children took.
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Regardless of what portion size the children were offered, they took the same number of bites during the meal. Those with the larger portions just took bigger bites, putting more food in their mouths per bite. Children given double the usual portion size of the entrée ate 25 percent more food by volume, consuming 15 percent more calories than children who got the regular-size portions. Children were not aware that the portion size had been increased, and
they did not compensate for eating more of the entrée by eating less of the accompanying foods.

The researchers did a follow-up study on decreasing portions: if they reduced the calories in the meal, would the children eat more to compensate? They reduced the amount of pasta in an entrée and added more pureed cauliflower and broccoli. The kids ate more vegetables and did not compensate by eating more of the other foods. And 79 percent of the children said the lower-calorie entrée tasted better!
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Adults, too, tend to eat in proportion to what they are served. David Levitsky and Trisha Youn from Cornell University recruited thirteen college students for a study to see what would happen when the students were served more food than they usually ate.
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First, they asked the students to help themselves to a buffet lunch of soup, pasta, bread, and ice cream on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Researchers weighed the lunches and determined what the typical average portion size would be. The following week, they fed one group exactly the same amount as the self-served portions, the second group 25 percent more, and the third group 50 percent more. No surprise: the groups served the most ate the most.

When seventy-five adults were offered six-inch, eight-inch, ten-inch, and twelve-inch sandwiches in another study, they also ate more when served the larger sizes.
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However, even though people served the twelve-inch sandwiches ate the most, there was no difference afterward as to how they rated how hungry or full they felt compared to those who ate the eight- and ten-inch sandwiches. In addition, when asked to rate how large their sandwich was, the women eating the ten-inch sandwiches rated the size the same as did the women eating the twelve-inch sandwiches. Misperceiving the size of food is quite common.

Dr. Barbara Rolls of Penn State University, one of the most prominent researchers in the area of portion sizes and weight control, wanted to see how long people would sustain eating larger portion sizes. She had twenty-three participants come to her laboratory to eat all their food for eleven days in a row, not once but twice, for a total of twenty-two days.
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During one of the eleven-day sessions, she served standard portions of
food. During the other eleven-day session, she served the participants 50 percent more of everything.

Previous studies had suggested that after a couple of days, people would naturally begin to compensate and eat less. But no such compensation was seen. For eleven days in a row, the participants ate an average of 423 more calories per day when they were served larger portions.

What is most surprising about this series of studies was participants’ consistent lack of insight and awareness of portion sizes. In one study comparing how much people ate when they were served four different portion sizes of macaroni, more than half of the fifty-one participants didn’t even notice that the portion sizes were different.
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Nor did they experience different degrees of hunger and satiety from eating different-sized portions.

Larger Portions = Larger People

Many of us are aware that the portion sizes served in restaurants have increased over the past thirty years and that bulk packaging of the foods in warehouse supermarkets has become larger. There is no doubt that the increased portion sizes bear responsibility for a significant part of the obesity epidemic.

Also, as our society has grown more affluent, families are eating out more often: today nearly half of our food dollars are spent on meals away from home. What do we get now from a restaurant that we wouldn’t have gotten thirty or more years ago? In 1955, a McDonald’s burger weighed 1.6 ounces. Today, the burgers come in four sizes, with the larger ones being four ounces (quarter-pound) or eight ounces (half-pound). At a sit-down restaurant like Howard Johnson’s, a burger in the 1970s weighed 3.5 ounces. Today it weighs either five ounces or eight ounces.

When sodas were introduced in 1916, the volume was 6.5 ounces per single serving. Now sodas are typically served in no less than twelve-ounce sizes, but sixteen-, twenty-, and even thirty-four-ounce sizes are intended as single servings. Size inflation occurs not just with
fast food; it also affects items like bagels, muffins, cookies, steaks, pasta, and pizza.
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In 1986, a study measured the portion sizes of breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods that college students selected from a buffet. When the study was repeated twenty years later, college students served themselves considerably more cereal, more milk on the cereal, more orange juice and fruit salad, but less tossed salad.
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Size inflation has changed the judgment of portion norms.

With the increase in portion sizes since the 1970s, the typical restaurant meal now provides significantly more calories than are needed.
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Although fast food restaurants are commonly blamed for contributing to obesity, sit-down restaurants may be even more guilty. Before the 2011 California state mandate to label calories, the Spicy Buffalo Chicken Melt at Denny’s had 930 calories, and the Fabulous French Toast Platter had 1,261 calories. At Applebee’s, the Crispy Orange Skillet with rice, veggies, and noodles had 1,706 calories, and the Southwest Philly Roll-up with sour cream, salsa, and fries had 2,231 calories.

At sit-down restaurants, too, we may be more likely to order desserts, an important source of excess calories with almost no nutritional benefits (Applebee’s Blue Ribbon Brownie has 1,600 calories). With calorie menu labeling, many outlets have modestly reduced the number of calories per serving.
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But with unlimited free refills of high-calorie items like sodas, taco chips, bread, rolls, and butter, we still get far more calories than we need in most casual dining venues.

And More Calories per Bite

It’s not just that restaurants serve larger portions today than in the past; they also use more high-calorie ingredients, like butter and oil, than most people use when they cook at home. Everyone knows that a pound of butter has many more calories than a pound of broccoli. That’s because butter has greater energy density—the number of calories per unit of weight. The butter is more energy-dense because it is composed of fat, which has nine calories per gram. In contrast, broccoli is mostly made of water, which has zero calories per gram.
We might think the Caesar salad is a good choice, but the dressing is mostly made of fat, so the salad might even have more calories than the burger and fries. The brown rice seems healthy, but some restaurants add a lot of butter, possibly more than doubling its calories. Even if we think we know which foods to eat, we still have limited ability to judge calories, if they aren’t listed and if we don’t know all the ingredients that were added in the preparation.

Automatic Judgments About Size

              
Which Has More Water?

Determining the size and volume of the food and drinks we consume is difficult. Look at the two glasses above. Which do you think has more water?

Although most people would guess that the taller glass holds more liquid than the shorter glass, in reality, they contain the same amount. Accurate volume judgments are complicated processes that require knowing the geometric formulas for volume as well as the height, width, and depth of the container. People automatically, and often incorrectly, use the height of an object to assess the volume, even though width and depth are equally important measures.
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Just how much can our eyes deceive our stomachs? Priya Raghubir
and Aradhna Krishna, professors in the business schools of NYU (previously at UC Berkeley) and the University of Michigan, respectively, developed a series of experiments to find out. In one study, forty people were shown twenty-seven different cylindrical containers of varied height and width, all filled with water. Some jars were short and fat. Others were tall and thin. But they all had the same volume of water inside. As expected, most participants thought that the taller cups contained more water. But when the cups were half-filled with the same volume of water and participants were asked to drink the water from both cups, most thought they drank less from the tall cup than from the shorter cup. The illusion is likely a contrast between what was expected and what was experienced.

Our incorrect perceptions about volume lead us to consume more than we think. The larger we perceive the size of a container to be, the less we think we may have consumed from it; thus, people tend to consume more from larger containers. In another experiment Raghubir and Krishna showed how this happens by giving people different-sized cups. When the participants were told to drink as much as they wanted, those with larger glasses drank more.

These researchers did another experiment to see whether people preferred larger or smaller cups. They placed different-sized glasses on a table and asked fifty-three people to choose one for a drink. Most spontaneously chose the taller cup. In a follow-up study in which participants were asked which cup they preferred, again the majority preferred the taller glass. This behavior also holds true for packaged goods at stores: people tend to choose packages that look larger, even when they contain the same amount as smaller packages.

Efforts have been made to train people to become better judges of portion sizes, but there are significant limitations to how much most people can learn and retain.
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In particular, people have a very difficult time estimating the volume of foods that are amorphous—that is, they take the shape of the container they are in. These include foods like jam, mayonnaise, applesauce, and pudding. In one study, even after participants received intensive training, the average estimates of a container of popcorn were off by more than 60 percent, and of rice by more than 30 percent.