Saturday, August 05, 2006

The secret of a successful diet?

Smaller bowls and smaller utensils may be a key to a successful diet, according to a small experiment that used nutrition professionals as subjects.

At a social gathering of 85 faculty members, graduate students and staff at the department of food science at the University of Illinois, the partygoers served themselves ice-cream.

They did not know they were also the subjects of an experiment. Half the participants were given bowls with a half-litre capacity, and half were given litre-capacity bowls.

In addition, half were given 60ml spoons to scoop their ice cream and half were given 90ml serving spoons. With larger spoons, people served themselves 14.5 per cent more, and with a larger bowl, they heaped on 31 per cent more.

With both a large spoon and a large bowl, the nutrition experts helped themselves to 56.8 per cent more ice cream than those who used the smaller utensils. And almost all of them ate all the ice-cream they took.

The findings will appear in the The American Journal of Preventive Medicine; reported by The New York Times.

Can anyone tell me why nutritionists are eating Ice cream? It annoys me that we are supposed to be taking their advice, while they can't follow it themselves! And if they are advising eating ice cream, then as nutritionists, they aren't worth a damn.

Healthy food - according to the University of Illinois.


Steve

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don’t know why nutritionists are eating ice cream, but I recommend it to my clients.

There is only one caveat, they have to follow their diet and exercise regime at least 85% of the time. If they do, they get to have one cheat day, when they can indulge. I found it to be a very affective technique. This way, they don’t crave "forbidden" foods, and don’t end up falling off the wagon.