Plate Color Determines Serving Size

What’s the newest way to lose weight? Change the color of your dishes.

According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, called “Plate Size and Color Suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion’s Bias on Serving and Eating Behavior,”
it’s not just plate size that encourages people to serve themselves a certain amount of food, but also plate color.

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A podcast from Scientific American describes the study. Participants, who were chosen randomly, attended a buffet lunch featuring pasta. The 60 adults were then split up and ushered to two different buffet lines. One line only had pasta with white Alfredo sauce, while the other line had only pasta with red marinara sauce. People in both lines were randomly assigned a red or white plate.

The results? People who were in the marinara line with a red plate and people in the Alfredo line with a white plate served themselves much more food than people in both lines whose food did not match the colors of their plate. Ultimately, people tend to serve themselves less food if the food they are eating is not the same color as their plates.

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It seems that people with white dishes are safe for the most part (unless of course you’re eating pasta with Alfredo sauce for dinner). For buffet or family style meals, using dishes that have a variety of colors not only brings extra flare to the dinner table, but it could also prevent overeating.

Will this study influence the color of your future dishes?

7-second life story: I was pre-med in college, until I realized that I could turn baking my problems away (instead of doing my chem homework) into a profession.

Hometown: Los Angeles

3 things I make better than anyone else: Pancakes (they are a Sunday morning staple for the Bain family), cookie dough (I will take the raw stuff over just-out-of-the-oven cookies any day), chili

Recipe I’m on the eternal hunt for: The easiest-ever, throw-together soup that I still have time to make after work

Kitchen technique I just can’t get right: Poaching eggs. I swirl the water, just like everyone says I should, but it never works. #fail

Follow me on Twitter @zoeabain.

Source link : https://www.delish.com/food/news/a38962/dishware-color-determines-serving-sizes/

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Publish date : 2012-01-24 08:00:00

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