Study Finds People Eat More If Food Is Colorful

ByABC News
May 26, 2004, 12:32 PM

May 27, 2004 -- Despite all the jawboning and gibberish about weight control, most Americans are still carrying around a few extra pounds because we lack the willpower to be careful about what and how much we eat. Right?

Not exactly, according to one major research program. What's also going on is a bit of trickery. And not just by the fast food industry. Our own brains trick us into eating more than we should.

Brian Wansink of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has made a career out of tricking people into thinking they are eating less than they really are.

Wansink, who holds an odd combination of positions at the university, including professor of marketing and professor of nutritional science, arrived at his conclusions after sticking bowls of jelly beans and M&Ms under people's noses, getting others to eat stale popcorn that's two weeks old, and even rigging up soup bowls that replenish the soup as it's being consumed, without the knowledge of the consumer.

The findings, in a nutshell, are pretty basic:

If your dinner tonight includes a lot of variety, chances are you're going to pig out.

If there's food readily available, chances are you're going to eat it. It's sort of a takeoff on that old proverb, if you serve it, they will come.

And if you think there's more there to eat, you're probably going to eat more. Even if it's stale popcorn.

What all that suggests, Wansink says, is the "hidden persuaders" that compel us down the road to obesity are "incredibly powerful" and "really, really subtle."

The findings strike at the core of why so many people are overweight these days.

"Most of us do a pretty decent job of deciding what we are going to eat," he says. "But we do a really bad job of deciding how much."