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Getting Refills at Chinese Buffets: What Predicts How Many Trips You Will Make?
Author(s) -
Wansink Brian,
Payne collin Richards,
shimizu mitsuru,
Just david R
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.25.1_supplement.342.7
Subject(s) - trips architecture , business , computer science , parallel computing
Obesity has been linked to large portions of caloric, convenient, tempting, inexpensive food. These factors meet for lunch everyday at the growing number of all‐you‐can‐eat restaurants and buffets. We investigated how a wide range of environmental variables and seemingly unrelated eating behaviors relate to how many times a person refills their plate while at the buffet. Trained observers recorded the height, weight, sex, age, and behavior of 387 patrons at Chinese all‐you‐can‐eat restaurants. Various seating, serving, and eating behaviors were then compared across BMI levels. These included whether used larger plates vs. smaller plates (OR 1.16, P < 0.01), faced the buffet or away from it (OR 1.10, P < 0.001), whether they used chopsticks vs. forks (OR 0.90, P < 0.05), whether they browsed the buffet before eating vs. serving themselves immediately (OR 0.92, P < 0.001), and the number of average times they chewed their food. Interestingly, these Chinese buffet observations provide consistent ecological validity to key principles of overeating that have been shown in more controlled, but less realistic lab settings. Some of these principles include convenience (eating with a fork instead of chopsticks), consumption norms (using larger plates), and salience (facing the food). As such, these results provide key ecological validity for many lab studies that have been previously faulted as artificial.