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Diners Tend To Eat More If Their Companions Are Overweight
BarbaraHudson writes: A University of Illinois study (abstract) that shows that people tend to eat more in the presence of an overweight person. From the article: "The test involved a sample of 82 college coeds who were observed helping themselves to a simple pasta and salad meal. Each of the coeds were themselves of normal weight. The students first required to watch what they believed was a fat woman serving herself some of the food. The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit.
After observing the "corpulent" woman serve herself, the students were allowed to come forward and serve themselves pasta and salad. On average, the coeds each served themselves more pasta than the "fat" woman had selected while taking less salad than she did. When the same study was performed with the actress appearing sans the fat suit, researchers observed that students ended up eating more salad than pasta. The conclusion was simple: people may consume more unhealthy food and eat less healthy food when in the presence of an overweight person." As anyone on a diet will tell you, a waist is a terrible thing to mind. Weight control is a lot more complex than the article makes it seem, though some will welcome the opportunity to blame someone else.
After observing the "corpulent" woman serve herself, the students were allowed to come forward and serve themselves pasta and salad. On average, the coeds each served themselves more pasta than the "fat" woman had selected while taking less salad than she did. When the same study was performed with the actress appearing sans the fat suit, researchers observed that students ended up eating more salad than pasta. The conclusion was simple: people may consume more unhealthy food and eat less healthy food when in the presence of an overweight person." As anyone on a diet will tell you, a waist is a terrible thing to mind. Weight control is a lot more complex than the article makes it seem, though some will welcome the opportunity to blame someone else.
Give money grant money! Give! Give!
So obesity in America is a snowball effect and cannot be stopped.
So can we expect all the junk food emporiums to now start recruiting fatties to serve their customers?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
An advertising campaign: fat women eating salad.
"The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit." It must have been too difficult to find an obese person in Illinois.
Not really, it's just if they paid a fat lady to stuff food into herself, they could have been sued for damages.
Require signing an agreement before?
Also america is pathetic with all this suing about everything. This only proves how retarded people live there that don't understand anything about their own lives, and then have to 'sue for damages' because they were not told the obvious.
The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit.
Why ? I can't imagine it would be too hard to find a genuinely fat person to take the job.
If the reverse is true, which seems fairly likely, there'll be an equilibrium at some point. If that point is overweight for both persons, it'd be interesting to which trend continued (assuming fat people eat less around slimmer people). I guess they'll publish more papers exploring the other combinations of people in the future.
That they "may" have wasted time on a study that proves nothing.
Mirror Neurons.
Everyone seems to be focusing on imitation but what if the reason is different? What if the reason is lack of pressure? Namely "They're heavy, they won't judge me." is taken as an excuse to let self control loose. Seeing it controlled vs eating alone would be interesting and could help narrow it down. If alone and feeling unwatched would people eat more alone than even with someone heavier would imply the pressure theory, while eating more with someone heavier than while alone and unwatched would imply imitation. .
Not really, it's just if they paid a fat lady to stuff food into herself, they could have been sued for damages.
An obese lady would attempt to sue due to one meal?
This would be that one time where I would actually welcome the term "pre-existing condition", since it would be quite obvious and fitting here.
As opposed to where the OP wants the blame placed.
Not once have I ever had a fat person grab my hand and shovel food down my throat. I get it, this is just another example of blame someone else rather than accept responsibility for your own actions.
What bunch of fat heads.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
So, do we put them in special sections with visual barriers, or just make them eat outside where we can't see them? Will we see fat people huddled around doorways in winter, banished outside while they eat their Snickers?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I propose we immediately isolate the carriers of "fattening disease".
After all, it's infectious and it creates more casualties than ebola and the black plague combined! And since we don't know the vectors yet, other than "fat women", we should isolate anyone with a BMI over 25. In any case they shouldn't be allowed to travel. I mean, it might spread to Europe. Or even Africa, which has so far been mercifully untouched by "fattening disease"!
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
The summary says, "each served themselves more pasta than the "fat" woman had selected while taking less salad than she did."
The articles both say that the amount of food that the actress took was irrelevant. All that mattered was whether she was wearing the prosthesis (what the summary refers to as a "fat suit").
Given the way that they did the study though, I'm not terribly convinced. We're talking about 82 people here. Wouldn't it make more sense to monitor their behavior over multiple visits with multiple actresses? The behavior they note might simply be an accident of the grouping. If they happened to put the 41 people who prefer pasta to salad in the two sections that showed a preference for pasta, that could explain the results.
Note: I haven't read the paper. I'm going entirely by the results described in the two articles. However, this is exactly why studies should need to be reproduced before people start using them for recommending behavior changes.
Especially if you have no will power, and are susceptible to the power of suggestion. Be the stalk of wheat that sways with the wind based on what you see or what you hear. Don't fight the wind, let it push you into the river down to a cataclysmic life ending heart attache or obesity! OH NOES!
For comparison, my wife is overweight. We went to the Golden Corral buffet yesterday where she had - a salad, small serving of mac & cheese, mixed vegetables, corn, and a bowl of salad. I (being standard bmi weight + 18 pounds = slightly overweight) had a piece of chicken, some fajita mix meat, and a soda. We were both full after not having eaten anything else yesterday. So this is a huge earth-stopping problem - especially amongst those who feel they must criminalize people and scorn them every chance they can based on what they are eating.
Why not just bugger off and worry about yourself? Or is your own life so terribly bad that you can't feel 'good' unless you make someone else feel bad all the time?
Prepare for the experiment:
1. Gather one hour and fifty-one minutes of food and drink
2. Get comfortable
Perform the experiment:
4. Visit this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVCbIzeQb30
5. Report results.
SPOILER: AT 1:28:33 he says the word, "inconceivable"
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
This hall experiment seems like a good lesson explaining why correlation is not causation and how NOT to measure correlation.
1. First of all, they published only the mean and not the variance so we can’t tell how different the quantities were among the participants. Another data that is missing is the time and day of the different meals.
2. It seems the fat person was only the first person in the line so it’s very strange it affected the rest of the people waiting in the line who did not see her.
3. The experiment should have been made several times with the same group with actors of different genders and weights. Not with different groups with the same actor. That way you eliminate different artifacts that could influence the experiment: the gender bias of the groups towards men/women, different food intake of different people and, of course, the possibility that a different day of the week might influence how hungry you are.
4. The fact that people are taking more food to their plates doesn’t mean they are eating more.
5. It’s incredibly wrong and misleading to declare that this experiment can draw valid conclusions on anybody who is not a college senior aged 18-19 and is eating next to an obese woman roughly that age.
5. It seems to me that the article is more PR driven than science driven since it’s obvious this story has one purpose: to promote the book that is mentioned in the second link (yes, another f***ing diet book).
I think all the arguments I’ve made here make it clear that this “study” is nothing more than a publicity driven draft of a research and should be taken seriously.
"Time to bring on the public shame for fat people!"
Hell yeah, I personally could do without El Rushbo AND Michael Moore.
Studies involving a small (82), biased (coeds) number of college students who were primed (required to watch) are not science. "The conclusion was simple". As is anyone believing said conclusion.
Yet another case of a prior conclusion being reached by a fabricated "study". Groundwork for controlling people's diets.
Considering the bulk of human evolution has been spent hungry, looking for something to eat, it makes perfect sense to emulate people who appear to be the opposite of hungry.
.
Not only is (whatever they are eating) fundamentally safe, it's so abundant they're fat. For all but the last 50 years, those were purely positive cues.
Note the actress wrote a 50 lb fat suit....I'm curious if she was morbidly obese (ie 150lb fat suit, obviously unhealthy) if the same would still be true.
-Styopa
"The fat woman was actually an actress wearing a fat suit." It must have been too difficult to find an obese person in Illinois.
No, this was to reduce the number of variables in the experiment. Same woman, same hair color, same face, same eye color, etc, but different apparent body build.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
if they paid a fat lady to stuff food into herself,
I didn't read the study. But the summary says nothing about the fat (suit) lady 'stuffing' herself. It does point out that the test subjects served themselves more than the actress.
I figured this was going to happen when I saw the subject. Lots of preconcieved opinions and stereotypes. Lots of anti-fat predjudice and defensiveness from the other side. Fat people 'stuff' themselves. Skinny people 'eat'. Yeah, right.
Is "taking more" the same as "eating more"? Did all the coeds clean their plates?
Ken
Weird. I'm the token fatty in my circle of friends, and they tend to order (and consume) more food than I do, regardless of whether I'm around (based on Facebook photos and such). In fact their ordering behavior is one of the reasons I'm overweight to begin with, due to ten years of socializing with them caused by my poor self-restraint and relatively poor metabolism. But do I try to blame them for it? Nope.
Maybe this study would better-serve us if they selected people who are more likely to actually keep the weight on. There are a lot of young people with a souped-up metabolism who can eat more and not gain weight without severe health problems. I'd focus the study on those people who are inclined to develop issues and see whether the gaggle of coeds contribute to a risk there (that is, study both people who are prone to obviously being overweight, and people who tend to get "fat on the inside").
Well, Michelle has moved to DC.
I just eat whatever I want to eat.
A salad isn't one of those things.
Any study that tells me something I don't like about myself is actually someone else's fault has to be accurate. These fat people are now making the rest of us fat! We need to pass some new laws (likely written by lobbyists for Hostess Twinkies) to put a stop to this! Won't someone please think of the (fat) children?!
I'm guessing that watching the fat person near the food supply triggers an "eat the food before it is gone!" response.
Or as the fat person is not a competitor, you can let yourself go. It would be interesting to have an "ideal" mate also waiting for food. Though this would not prove one of these ideas as it would just come down to which is a stronger motivator.
This is why all those "be OK with how you look" campaigns are ultimately misguided. I read another similar study that found that overweight friends were a bigger predictor of individual obesity than overweight siblings and parents. Your brain is telling you you're fat, he's fat, she's fat, it's OK to be fat. Normalizing "fat" results in more fat.
First time I read that I thought it said recycling.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Isn't this just an illustration that - no matter how we try to believe it was otherwise - standards level down?
If someone's stuffing herself silly then as long as you eat a bit less than she does you can get away with it because you're not the pig of the group.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if a similar situation existed around beer consumption, pinching things from the office, speeding or illegal parking etc.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Dude, you *do not* eat a light meal when she is binging. Not if you want to live, because she will take it very personally. One of the great regrets of my married life is that I didn't think more about what having a wife who's heavy would mean to my diabetes control. When we dated, it was nice to eat with someone who thought it was good to watch what we both ate. Now, though? I have to stealth trigger a page from work to get away from the table so she doesn't think I'm criticizing her by *taking less food*.
no I think it was more they couldn;t find a fat person that would eat a salad.
I am obese, my daily diet is a soft limit of 1,000 calories. Most skinny people would starve to death eating as little as I do. What I typically see are skinny people piling up a big plate of food, grabbing a large coffee or soda and pigging out like there's no tomorrow. They are quite disgusting to see in eating in public. Try drinking some water and ordering the small size next time you fucking pigs.
Isn't it not just that one eats less when fraternising with slimmer people?