Unconventional wisdom: Old popcorn, big containers and obesity
Inside Bay Area
THE OBVIOUS big reason why people get fat is that we greedy little piggies tend to eat too much of the tasty foods that we like.
But it turns out that's half the story: We're also more than willing to eat too much bad-tasting food if it's served to us in large portions. Here's something to remember if you are escaping the heat by taking in this summer's movie hits.
To see if size matters, Brian Wansink of Cornell University and Junyong Kim of the University of Central Florida served free popcorn in different size containers to moviegoers in Philadelphia. Half of the 158 test subjects got freshly made popcorn. The other half got stale popcorn that was 14 days old. (The two-week old popcorn was perfectly safe, just a bit funky.)
After the movie, they measured how much popcorn the moviegoers had eaten, and how they thought the popcorn tasted.
"Moviegoers who were given fresh popcorn ate 45.3 percent more popcorn when it was given to them in large containers," they reported in last fall's issue of Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior. Even when the popcorn was disliked, people still ate 34 percent more popcorn when eating from a large container than from a medium-size container.
"The silver lining of these findings may be that portion size can also be used to increase the consumption of less preferred healthful foods, such as raw vegetables," they suggested.
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