The expensive way to NOT lose weight?
Are you a fan of 100-calorie snack packs? You may want to reconsider these little devils in disguise.
Some interesting research has emerged from the Journal of Consumer Research. Rik Pieters and colleagues at Tilburg University in the Netherlands have shown that diet-sized snack packs may actually cause people to eat more.
As published in Wednesday’s New Scientist:
They had 140 students watch TV – to rate advertising, they were told – and gave them either two 200-gram bags of potato chips or nine 45-gram packs. To activate “self-regulatory concerns”, half of the students were asked about weight issues and weighed in front of a mirror – all supposedly as part of another study.
Among students without weight thoughts, three-quarters opened their small bags and half opened their large bags. Both ate about the same amount. In volunteers primed with a diet mindset, however, just a quarter of students opened their large bags, eating half as many chips as the 59 per cent of students who cracked open the small packs.
Pieters thinks that people drop their guard around pre-proportioned snack foods and thinks other “health” foods may have same effect.
It’s always about willpower, isn’t it? I can see the appeal of these snack packs to people who have trouble with the WILLdebeast. How irritating that something that’s supposed to help us learn self-control actually hinders it.
Willpower or not, these snack packs are just spendy ways to buy processed food and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone. If you’re trying to practice portion control, then what about nuts or fruit? You can figure out the right portions yourself and this way you’re LEARNING something rather than letting a big evil company do the work for you. They don’t care if you lose weight or not. They’re just in it to make more money. Sad thing is, they are.
Diet-sized snack packs turn off willpower [New Scientist]