You might already be aware of the ‘red plate’ trick. But now researchers in China reckon they’ve got another simple hack to stop you from eating so much junk.
Cutting your food up into small pieces and scattering them across your plate will help you eat less and potentially lose weight, experts claim.
This is because portion size, rather than feelings of fullness, dictates how much people eat — so making people think they are eating more can curb over-eating, according to the scientists.
The theory was tested on a few dozen volunteers, who were shown pictures of the same quantities of chocolate and in different layouts.
Chocolate was either kept together, resembling a bar, or separated with gaps.
Most participants were convinced they were looking at more chocolate when it was in lots of pieces, results revealed.
Researchers from Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an say their findings may provide advice to reduce the risk of overeating.
The results provide ‘practical guidance for nudging less consumption’ to reduce the risk of people eating larger portions unconsciously, the team added.
It works on a similar logic as the infamous ‘red plate’ trick, devised by a University of Oxford professor who champions ‘gastrophysics’.
Red plates trigger a danger signal, which subconsciously tricks us into eating less, according to Dr Charles Spence.
Since being pushed as a quirky weight-loss tip over a decade ago, serving meals on a red plate has become one of the most common ‘tricks’ peddled online.
Experts recruited 34 participants, aged 20 on average, for the most recent study published in the journal Food Quality and Preference.
They looked at 60 pictures of chocolate.
The pictures showed ten different quantities of the sweet, ranging from around 60g to 200g, but cut into a different number of pieces.
For example, there were six pictures of 100g of chocolate split into between nine to 16 pieces. After being cut up, the chocolate was either kept together — resembling the original bar — or spread out with a few centimetres between each piece. -Daily Mail.uk