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premise that consumers might be lulled into a false sense of dietary security by small portion sizes, University of Tilberg scientist Rik Pieters and his colleagues 11 set out to discover how a diet-conscious mindset and a big bag of crisps can influence a person’s eating habits. The team recruited 140 male and female students who were told they were taking part in an advertising study, which involved watching some television commercials. The participants were given either two large bags or nine small bags of chips tomunch during the viewing. Before the screenings started, half the students were also made ‘diet aware’ by weighing them in front of a mirror.
    The team then totalled up how many bags of chips the students opened and what weight of food they ultimately ate. The results were quite literally gob-smacking. Amongst the non-diet-conscious volunteers, 50% opened the big bags whilst 75% opened the small bags. Weighing the food eaten, however, showed that both groups had nonetheless consumed about the same amounts.
    But amongst the participants who were weighed first, the story took an interesting twist. In this case only 25% of the students given big bags of crisps actually opened them. But when they did, they ate half as much as the 59% of students who opened their small bags. This shows that, far from helping people to exercise dietary restraint, under certain circumstances restricted-size packages can actually trigger increased eating. The team think that the effect occurs because small portions effectively fly beneath the nutritional radar and fail to trigger our normal self-restraining behaviour.
    â€˜The tendency of consumers to believe that smaller quantities of tempting products are“acceptable” and to consider single-serving packages even as helpful self-regulatory tools can contribute to increased consumption compared to when products are offered in quantities considered to be “unacceptable”, which could instigate consumption restraint,’ say the researchers. So big bags in the hands of diet-conscious individuals made them think twice about opening them in the first place, and then made them regret every morsel. The smaller bags, however, didn’t trigger the same calorie-sensitive alarm bells and so the students ate more.
    According to Rik Pieters, the apparent willingness of food manufacturers to provide ‘healthier’ and ‘smaller’ portions may be because they already know this happens, and that by marketing their products in this way they can effectively kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand they can expand their markets by selling more food and on the other they can promote themselves in a healthy light. Consumers, meanwhile, merely expand their waistlines …

Researchers have found that, contrary to expectations, thinking about food can help to reduce how much you eat. We usually associate food fantasies with hunger pangs and a subsequent binge, but a recent study by Birmingham University researcher Suzanne Higgs 12 suggests that this is a nutritional myth. She and her colleagues invited a group of 47 healthy (non-obese) female students to take part in a ‘snack-attack’ test advertised on the university campus as an investigation into the relationship between food and mood. In reality, it was the culinary equivalent of an episode of candid camera, during which the researchers scrutinised the eating habits of the participants to see whether thinking about food actually made them hungrier.
    The volunteers were presented with plates ofbiscuits to eat, either one hour or three hours after they were given a set lunch at the laboratory. Before embarking on the biscuit sampling, half of the students were asked to produce a detailed description of the lunch they had eaten, while the other half were asked to write down the details of their journey in to the test that day. After some cookie-related questions intended to mask the true