Eat! Eat and Forget, Yeah!

Hey all!  I hope everyone is surviving in this heat.  I guess it wouldn't really be summer without that one week of crazy high temperatures.  Air conditioning has definitely become one of my best friends recently.

Anyways, since it's been so hot outside, I've been staying inside and enjoying one of my favorite pastimes:  eating.  It's weird, but eating is something I enjoy quite a bit, but not something I ever really pay much attention to.  I'll eat and enjoy good food, sure, but it's more of an automatic process than anything.

I mean, how many people really pay attention to the food in front of them when they're watching TV?  It's more like you keep on watching and happen to pay attention when it goes to commercial, which is usually a good excuse for grabbing more food.  Wansink, Painter, and North (http://www.nature.com/oby/journal/v13/n1/abs/oby200512a.html) happened to note this, and thus they decided to run a little experiment on it...

It was all quite simple, really...  People come in and get to watch a television program.  Better yet, they even get a free bowl of soup to go along with the program.  Pretty nice experiment, huh?

Well, of course, it is an experiment, so there had to be something going on behind the scenes.  Or in this case, underneath the table (but not like that!).  The experimenters actually rigged some of the soup bowls so that they were automatically refilling.  So, even if a whole bowl's worth of soup was consumed, it would look like only a 1/4 or a 1/2 would be gone.  Trippy, eh?

What did they find?  Well, the most surprising thing is that no one really caught on to the gimmick...  In fact, the results showed that those who drank from the refilling soup bowl thought that they only drank so much as the bowl was drained.  In other words, they believed they had only consumed 1/4 to 1/2 the bowl, even if they drank a whole bowl's worth.  This means that, on average, those who had the automatically refilling bowl not only objectively consumed more than those who didn't have a bowl that automatically refilled (about 73% more!), but they only felt as satiated as they perceived they consumed.  In other words, those that had the automatically refilling bowl only felt as full as they believed (key word!) they had consumed, which was about 1/4 to 1/2 of the bowl, even if they had objectively consumed a whole bowl's worth.

So, in other words, people were only as satiated as they believe they had eaten.  That, I believe, is very odd...  This means that we may eat more with our eyes than our stomachs...  The researchers hypothesized that this concept may be more associated with the American way of eating, where the emphasis is on eating quickly and preventing any food from being wasted.  Researchers contrasted this style to the French, where the emphasis is on enjoying the food.  The French tend to eat longer (about an hour or so per meal), and they also tend to stop eating when they feel full, not when they have more food left on their plate.  So, this American emphasis on efficiency may be part of the reason why we judge with our eyes rather than our stomachs.  It's odd to think that something as simple as what we see can affect something we believe is objective as satiety.  Then again, part of the fun of psychology is learning that we aren't as objective as we think they are, eh?  Oh well, just some "food" for thought hahaha.  Yeahhh, last time I'll be using that joke...