Having read a couple papers that looked at the amount of food people ate when using smaller vs. larger plates, I presumed it was something of a stylized fact that people ate less when using smaller plates. However, this review study just released in Obesity Reviews, suggests that
“Evidence to date does not show that dishware size has a consistent effect on food intake, so recommendations surrounding the use of smaller plates/dishware to improve public health may be premature.”
Guess I need to update my beliefs on this one. Here's the whole abstract:
“It has been suggested that providing consumers with smaller dishware may prove an effective way of helping people eat less and preventing weight gain, but experimental evidence supporting this has been mixed. The objective of the present work was to examine the current evidence base for whether experimentally manipulated differences in dishware size influence food consumption. We systematically reviewed studies that experimentally manipulated the dishware size participants served themselves at a meal with and measured subsequent food intake. We used inverse variance meta-analysis, calculating the standardized mean difference (SMD) in food intake between smaller and larger dishware size conditions. Nine experiments from eight publications were eligible for inclusion. The majority of experiments found no significance difference in food intake when participants ate from smaller vs. larger dishware. With all available data included, analysis indicated a marginal effect of dishware size on food intake, with larger dishware size associated with greater intake. However, this effect was small and there was a large amount of heterogeneity across studies (SMD: −0.18, 95% confidence interval: −0.35, 0.00, I2 = 77%). Evidence to date does not show that dishware size has a consistent effect on food intake, so recommendations surrounding the use of smaller plates/dishware to improve public health may be premature.”