Food package size affects eating habits

[China Packaging Network News] Funny Nobel Prize In addition to a fixed number of awards (such as physics, chemistry awards, medical awards, etc.), there are also some random awards each year, such as public health awards, archeology awards, nutrition awards... ... The 2007 Nobel Prize received a nutrition award for Brian Wansink and two of his colleagues at the Cornell University Food and Brand Institute. However, the funny thing is that after reading their research results, you will find that this research may have little relation with nutrition.

According to the survey, the packaging of food has become more and more popular in recent decades, and there are more and more patients with obesity. For this reason, they made a conjecture that the size of the food package can affect people's eating habits. According to Wansink’s thesis, he and his colleagues designed a “bottomless bowl” that added a duct to the bottom of the bowl to automatically fill the bowl while the soup in the bowl was being drunk. Will not be discovered. They divided the testers into two groups. One group used a regular bowl to drink soup, and the other used this kind of "bottomless bowl." They found that people who drank soup with a “bottomless bowl” drank 73% more than those who drank soup in a regular bowl! They also found that people who used the “bottomless bowl” to drink soup generally reflected that they did not feel more full than usual.

In the past, psychologists generally believed that people chose large packages because they felt that large packages would be more affordable and not easy to eat, reducing the frequency of purchases. However, this theory cannot explain that in places where food is very abundant, such as cafeterias or party salons, people also prefer the large-packaged foods. Wan Sink’s “bottomless bowl” experiment puts forward a more “reliable” theory: The key to the ability of large packaging to increase people’s food intake is that it gives people “a person’s appetite is itself so large. "The psychological implications, because we will unconsciously think that this one is the amount of a person. In the experiment, the testers always thought that “I could finish a bowl of soup with my appetite.” Even though the soup would fill up continuously, they would constantly suggest themselves: I haven’t even finished a bowl of soup yet. So not enough.

The Institute of Food and Brands led by Professor Wan Sike is simply a “food research institute”. They not only study the influence of the size of the package on people’s food intake, but also study the order of light, music, food, etc. A series of external environmental effects on people's diet. Vansink once said: In today's food-rich era, we can easily obtain enough food most of the time. Therefore, it is not enough to control energy intake through "will power." People should change their eating habits through external conditions, for example, by changing the smaller dishes.