You planned on ordering a salad, but your friend's large, deep dish with extra everything meal made your mouth water and stomach growl. Before you know it you blurt out, "I'll have what she's having."
A new study suggests that dining with overweight companions could negatively influence your own choices when at the dinner table.
Published in the journal Appetite, researchers served 82 college students at Cornell University with either pasta or salad for lunch. With each new batch of eight participants, an actress who sometimes wore a "fat suit" stood at the beginning of the line.
Distracting those in line by talking loudly, the actress acted out several scenarios: she was slim and ate healthy (serving herself the salad), overweight and ate healthy, slim and ate unhealthy (serving herself the pasta) and overweight and ate unhealthy.
After eating in the dinning room with the actress, the students were then asked to fill out questionnaires.
Researchers found that regardless of whether the actress took pasta or salad, when she appeared to be overweight, those in line indulged more in pasta. "These results demonstrated that people may eat larger portions of unhealthy food and smaller portions of healthy food when eating with an overweight person," the researchers report.
You may be influenced to overeat when dinning with an overweight guest because you may feel it is okay to indulge. "We've long known that what a person orders can influence what you order," says Brian Wansink, co-author of the study and director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. "We haven't known as fully how the size of the person who you might be with, how they influence us."
