According to a recent study, people tend to eat more unhealthy food when they are having a meal with someone who is overweight. For the study, a professional actress donned a fat suit while eating with the test subjects who consisted of 83 undergraduate college students split up in groups of ten to twelve.
According to a recent study, people tend to eat more unhealthy food when they are having a meal with someone who is overweight.
For the study, a professional actress donned a fat suit while eating with the test subjects who consisted of 83 undergraduate college students split up in groups of ten to twelve.
During half of the meals, the actress, who weighs around 126 pounds, didn’t wear the costume, and for the other half she wore the suit making her appear to be around 176 pounds.
The study subjects served themselves a combination of pasta and salad.
Results of the study show that when the actress was wearing the overweight disguise, the subjects served themselves more pasta and less salad.
Experts theorize that the presence of an overweight person while someone is making decisions about what to eat might result in their thinking less about their own health and weight.
Researchers also noticed that when the overweight version of the actress loaded up on salad it didn’t alter the pasta preferences of the others. It’s believed they interpreted her attempts to eat healthy as being futile.
