When Brian Wansink threw a Super Bowl party, he placed large bowls of Chex Mix in one room and smaller bowls in another.

He discovered that the people who took the larger bowls consumed 53 percent more than those who took smaller bowls, consuming an additional 220 calories.

“People don’t believe that something as basic as the size of a bowl would influence how much they eat,” Wansink said.

Wansink, Dyson Professor of Marketing at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and author of “Mindless Eating,” spoke about his work in the Life Sciences Complex Wednesday night. Wansink outlined his research with over-eating and solutions to avoid weight gain pitfalls.

The Super Bowl experiment proved wrong one common myth of weight gain ­— the size of the bowl ultimately influenced how much the attendees consumed, Wansink said. But when he asked the attendees why they ate so much, the people who chose the larger bowls didn’t realize they ate more due to the size of the bowl.

“This is what we call the intelligence trap,” he said. “Smart people become victims of their own demise and think they’re smarter than a bowl.”

Wansink said using smaller plates can help discourage overeating. It is part of his Small Plate Movement, in which he discovered that using a 10-inch dinner plate instead of a 12-inch leads to a 22 percent less in food consumption.

Wansink also debunked the myth that people realize when they are full and can stop before they over-eat. During his bottomless soup bowl experiment, Wansink drilled holes in soup bowls and refilled the bowls from tubes that were strategically hidden under the table.

“One woman drank six quarts of soup through the bottomless bowl without realizing that it was refilling,” he said.

Out of 174 people who ate the soup, only two of them realized the bowl was bottomless and stopped eating. Wansink said he believes that Americans think they’re full only when their plate is empty.

“It’s going to be impossible for us as Americans not to think of food as fuel, whereas people in other countries have patterned meals and know when to stop,” he said.

In order to eat healthier, people need to make healthy food easily accessible and put junk food out of reach, Wansink said. He added that moving serving plates about six feet away will make people think twice about getting more food.

Wansink also suggested keeping a fruit bowl on a counter at home to decrease mindless eating.

“Every time you walk by, the fruit will be more tempting to take rather than looking for something else to eat,” he said.

Wansink contacted eight schools in a district to help increase their fruit sales in the cafeteria as part of his Smarter Lunchroom Movement in 2009.  His instructions were simple: take the fruit and put it in a nice bowl in a well-lit area.  Fruit sales increased more than 103 percent, surprising the schools and Nancy Rindfuss, a dietician in the David B. Falk School of Sport and Human Dynamics.

“It’s interesting how the placement of food in a school cafeteria affects how students eat,” she said.

Holly Gilligan, a graduate student studying nutrition, said she thinks addressing mindless eating is very important.

“I already have been using smaller plates and bowls and am eager to try the fruit bowl idea,” she said.

At the end of his lecture, Wansink stressed the importance of making small changes toward healthy eating habits by reading a quotation from his book.

Said Wansink: “The best diet is the diet you don’t know you’re on.”

Published on February 27, 2014 at 2:15 am