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Food Displays, Food Colors
Affect How Much People Eat
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Variety may
be the spice of life -- and a key contributor to an expanding waistline
Research by Brian Wansink, a
professor of marketing and nutritional science at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, challenges the conventional notion that a person's ability to
control eating and stick to a successful diet has solely to do with willpower.
Little-understood contextual
cues -- such as how food is displayed and its variety of colors -- can lead
people to overindulge and unknowingly bulk up, he says in an article he wrote
that has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
For example, adults offered
six colored flavors of jellybeans mixed together in the same bowl ate 69 percent
more than when the colors were each placed in separate bowls.
In another study, moviegoers
given M&Ms in 10 colors ate 43 percent more than those offered the same
number of M&Ms in seven colors. Wansink and co-author Barbara E. Kahn, a
professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that not
just variety, but the perception of variety, stimulates how much a person
consumes.
"People eat with their
eyes, and their eyes trick their stomachs," Wansink said in an interview.
"If we think there's more variety in a candy dish or on a buffet table, we
will eat more. The more colors we see, the more we eat."
In the case of jellybeans, a
variety of flavors in a bowl was greeted by such comments as "looks really
colorful," "feels enjoyable," "satisfied as I ate" and
"gives me at least one flavor that I like."
An earlier study by Wansink
found that moviegoers given an extra-large bucket of popcorn will eat up to 50
percent more than those given a container one size smaller -- even when the
popcorn is stale.
Other studies have found that,
hungry or not, office employees will eat more if their desks are stocked with
food, or if the food is nearby, or if the package is open, or if the container
holding the food is clear rather than opaque.
"Many of us are
reasonably diligent about what we eat, but we don't put that much thought into
how much we eat," Wansink said. "People may decide to eat grapes
instead of potato chips because it's healthier. Once they make that initial
choice, they tend not to monitor how much they eat. And a pound of grapes isn't
calorie-free."
Consumers need to become more
aware of how color, package size, variety and physical proximity influence the
amount of food they ingest.
"If we ate 100 fewer
calories a day, instead of gaining 10 pounds at the end of a year, maybe we'd
lose 10 pounds. Small factors, like the type of candy bowl in your office, might
add five more Hershey's Kisses a day to your diet," he said.
"People may say: 'What's
the big deal? Five more chocolates isn't that significant.' But five more
chocolates is 125 more calories per day. Over a month of weekdays, that's 2,500
calories, or two-thirds of a pound."
Wansink, the director of the
Food & Brand Lab at Illinois, offered several tips about ways to curb
overeating:
* Avoid multiple bowls of the
same food at parties or receptions because they increase perceptions of variety
and stimulate overeating.
* At buffets and receptions
avoid having more than two different foods on your plate at the same time.
Wansink's tips for mothers and
food vendors to promote healthy eating include:
* Arrange foods into organized
patterns and avoid cramming meal tables or restaurant display cases with too
much variety.
* Arrange fruits and
vegetables in less-organized patterns to stimulate appetites.
* Assemble smaller helpings of
more items for children or elderly adults with finicky eating habits.
The title of the paper, which appeared in the March 2004 issue of the journal, is "The Influence of Assortment Structure on Perceived Variety and Consumption Quantities." (mei 2004)