Foodservice Footprint F40-p14 Smaller plates won’t cut consumption – study Health and Vitality  hv-email

Smaller plates won’t cut consumption – study

Tricking the brain into eating less by serving food on a smaller plate doesn’t necessarily work, according a new study.

Experts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel found that when people are food-deprived, they’re more likely to identify a portion size accurately, no matter how it is served.

The new study, published in the journal Appetite, reportedly debunks the popular diet trick based on the “Delbouef illusion” – the classic experiment showing that people perceive a similar black circle is smaller when it’s embedded in a larger circle than when it is embedded in a smaller one.

The researchers found that people who hadn’t eaten for at least three hours were more likely to identify proportions of pizza placed on larger and smaller trays correctly than people who had eaten recently.

This only worked when it applied to food – both groups were similarly inaccurate when asked to compare the size of black circles and hubcaps placed within different sized circles. According to the researchers, this indicates that hunger stimulates stronger analytic processing that is not as easily fooled by the illusion.

“Over the last decade, restaurants and other food businesses have been using progressively smaller dishes to conform to the perceptual bias that it will reduce food consumption,” said Dr Tzvi Ganel, head of the visual perception and action laboratory in BGU’s department of psychology, but “plate size doesn’t matter as much as we think it does”.

Ganel added: “Even if you’re hungry and haven’t eaten, or are trying to cut back on portions, a serving looks similar whether it fills a smaller plate or is surrounded by empty space on a larger one.”

A number of previous studies have found that smaller plates can limit consumption.