Everyone's Health

Why you get FAT!

Perils of portion size

The big reason why people get fat is that we eat too much of the tasty foods that we like.

But it turns out that we're also willing to eat too much bad-tasting food if it's served to us in large portions.

Researchers at Cornell University and the University of Central Florida served free popcorn in different size containers to moviegoers in Philadelphia. Half of the 158 test subjects got fresh popcorn. The other half got stale popcorn that was 14 days old. (The two-week-old popcorn was perfectly safe, just a bit funky.)

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 the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior. Even when the popcorn was disliked, people ate 34 percent more when eating from a large container.

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