{"id":101124,"date":"2015-03-23T09:25:29","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T13:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=101124"},"modified":"2015-10-20T13:05:43","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T17:05:43","slug":"smaller-plates-smaller-portions-not-always","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2015\/03\/smaller-plates-smaller-portions-not-always\/","title":{"rendered":"Smaller Plates, Smaller Portions? Not Always"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a><\/div>\n

It may have become conventional wisdom that you can trick yourself into eating less if you use a smaller plate. But a UConn Health study finds that trick doesn\u2019t work for everyone, particularly overweight teens.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has been assumed that overweight or obese consumers are more likely than others to underestimate the size of a food serving and accordingly overeat\u00a0\u2013 particularly when the food is presented on a large dinner plate or in a large container,\u201d says psychiatry professor Lance Bauer.<\/a> \u201cFor this reason and others, it is frequently recommended that these consumers use smaller plates to defeat the illusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when Bauer and UConn Health Alcohol Research Center<\/a> colleagues Victor Hesselbrock<\/a> and Dr. Jonathan Covault<\/a> tested teen girls\u2019 attentiveness and quizzed them about their perception of a constant portion size relative to varying plate sizes, they were surprised by the result.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn average, overweight or obese adolescent girls were less attentive than normal weight girls to visual cues of different types,\u201d Bauer says. \u201cThis suggests that changing the size of their dinnerware may be less effective than we thought. It also suggests that presenting them with detailed charts summarizing diet rules or calorie counts might also be less effective than we would like.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"UConn<\/a>
UConn Health psychiatry professor Lance Bauer. (Janine Gelineau\/UConn Health Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bauer presented his group\u2019s findings last week at the annual scientific meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society<\/a> in Savannah, Ga. The study involved 162 girls ages 14 to 18 in the Greater Hartford area, categorized by body mass.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe study\u2019s results imply that diet education for overweight or obese adolescents should be clear, simple, repeated, and interesting,\u201d Bauer says. \u201cThe next step might involve incorporating information about an overweight or obese child\u2019s cognitive abilities in his or her weight loss treatment. In diet education, one size might not fit all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Alcohol Research Center at UConn Health has been funded since its inception in 1978 by the National Institutes of Health Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and has attracted nearly $100 million from various funding sources. It is one of the longest continually funded alcohol research programs in the U.S.<\/p>\n

Follow <\/em>UConn Health<\/em><\/a> on <\/em>Facebook<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>YouTube<\/em><\/a>, and <\/em>SoundCloud<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UConn Health psychiatry researchers say visual cues are not universally effective in helping curb childhood obesity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":101114,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2231,259,179],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[57,2010],"class_list":["post-101124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-well-being","category-rudd-center","category-uconn-health"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-16 03:03:19","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101124"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105332,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101124\/revisions\/105332"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/101114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101124"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=101124"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=101124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}