From: NPR
Your Fellow Diners’ Size May Affect How Much You Eat
NPR:
Your dining companion may have more influence over your eating habits than you realize. We’ve known that people often have friends with similar body weights, but new research suggests that dining with an overweight companion may make us more likely to eat more unhealthful food.
A study in the appropriately named journal Appetite finds that undergraduates who were offered pasta and salad while eating near a 5-foot-5-inch, 126-pound woman would eat more pasta when she was zipped into a fat suit adding 50 pounds, or about 8 points, to her body mass index.
“We’ve long known that what a person [you’re with] orders can influence what you order,”Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and one of the study’s authors, tells The Salt. “We haven’t known as fully how the size of the person who you might be with, how they influence us.”
Read the whole story: NPR
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