Serve more food and they will eat it : US studies

By Allan Dowd

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) – If you eat too much
fattening food one day, don’t count on yourself to be good the
next day and eat less.

People offered large meals will eat them day after day,
according to a study released on Wednesday at a conference of
North American obesity researchers in Vancouver.

Health experts have pointed to large food portions, such as
“supersized” fast-food meals, as a culprit in the dramatic rise
in obesity rates in the United States.

Sixty four percent of Americans are considered to be either
overweight or obese.

“I think it’s quite obvious we need innovative strategies
to limit the impact of portion size on intake,” said Barbara
Rolls of Penn State University, who conducted the study.

The researchers tracked the eating habits and energy intake
of nearly two dozen men and women over 11 days, making it one
of the longest studies of its kind.

People would consistently eat more when offered large
meals, except in the case of vegetables, according to the
study.

“As someone who had been pushing fruits and vegetables for
weight reduction I find this quite discouraging,” Rolls said.

Another study presented to the annual meeting of North
American Association for the Study of Obesity (NAASO) on
Wednesday found that for snack food it may not be the size of
the bag that determines how much people eat.

Researchers who compared consumption of normal and larger
amounts of snacks such as potato chips found that people would
eat the larger amount available if it was presented in one
large serving or smaller individual increments.

“If we give people a greater amount of food, a greater
amount is consumed,” Hollie Raynor of Brown University in Rhode
Island told the Vancouver convention.

A third study released on Wednesday found the link between
overeating and availability of larger amounts of food in a meal
may start in children as young as age 2.

But the researchers said they also found that children who
tended to eat too much were less likely to do it when allowed
to serve the food to themselves.

Experts say it is difficult to convince Americans to limit
how much they eat, because of the convenience of large portions
at fast food outlets and the financial attraction of buying
low-priced food in bulk in stores.

“People like value. We’ve got to shift people away from
this value way of thinking of simply getting the most calories
for the least dollars, to value in terms of health,” Rolls told
reporters.

NAASO president Louis Aronne said the availability of
larger portions is not the only thing pushing the increase in
obesity.

“You start out massively over-eating because portions are
larger, and things get activated in the brain and liver that
fuel the upward movement in body weight,” Aronne said,

A recent survey by food-service company Aramark Corp. found
a majority of consumers would like restaurants to offer
half-sized portions on menus and more information on the
nutritional content of the meals.