Put Down Your Fork, Already!

May 22, 2007 — -- You've heard a thousand versions of diet and weight-loss advice, but now there's some advice that finally makes sense: use small plates.

The information comes out of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, where food is served to students in a place that looks like a restaurant. The diners become guinea pigs to uncover the secrets of our eating habits.

Servers tell diners to take as much as they want, and the test subjects are given a free meal if they simply rate the food. A man, acting as a waiter, tells a diner to go get some water. That's an excuse for him to take the plate and secretly weigh it before bringing it to the diner and then doing something quite unappetizing.

Each person gets their food coughed on because that gets them to take a second plate and serve themselves again. But the trick is that the second plate is a different size, either bigger or smaller than the first one. This test is not really about rating the food, it's about whether people take less food when they have small plates. And almost everyone put 25 percent more food on a bigger plate.

Why? "We eat with our eyes, not with our stomach," said Brian Wansink, a food psychology professor at Cornell University, who conducted this research and wrote the results in a book aptly called "Mindless Eating." "We really don't pay much attention to what we eat, or how much we eat," Wansink added.

According to Wansink, most people think they know when they're full, but in reality, people don't really know when they're full.

So should we all use small plates? Is that the answer?

"Absolutely," Wansink said. "Even tall, skinny glasses, because these are mindless ways to actually control how much we eat."

The glass reference comes from his tests that found even professionals, like bartenders, pour less into tall skinny glasses than short wide ones.

When Wansink asked 45 bartenders to pour drinks, they averaged 30 percent more liquor into the short, fat glasses.