Researchers from Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, China found a simple visual trick that could help people eat less. They showed volunteers photographs of food items that all weighed the same: some images showed whole pieces, while others showed the same food cut into smaller portions. Participants reported that the cut portions looked larger. The team thinks slicing food into smaller pieces and spreading them out on a plate can help people eat less and lose weight.
How the Study Was Conducted
The experiment involved 34 volunteers, all around 20 years old, according to the Daily Mail. The researchers showed them 60 photographs of chocolate bars that weighed between 60 and 200 grams. The bars were cut into different numbers of pieces. For example, in six images a 100-gram bar was divided into between 9 and 16 fragments. The pieces were either piled together to look like a whole bar or spread a few centimeters apart on the plate.
Participants guessed the weight of each portion. The results were surprising: volunteers judged a 100-gram bar divided into 16 pieces to be heavier than the same bar divided into nine pieces.
In a paper in Food Quality and Preference, the team concluded that more pieces on a plate make people perceive the portion as larger.
They suggested this may be linked to “contour integration,” a visual effect where people subconsciously include the empty spaces between pieces when judging overall size.
The team says this could be a simple eating strategy that helps people feel satisfied while consuming fewer calories.
The Analogy with the Red Plate Effect
The team said this trick works on the same principle as the red-plate effect. More than a decade ago, Professor Charles Spence of the University of Oxford described how plate color can influence how much we eat. He is credited with founding gastrophysics, the field that studies how our senses and perceptions — not just taste — shape how we experience food. Our eating behavior is influenced by all of our senses.
Spence argued that red plates can signal danger and thus subconsciously prompt us to eat less. That idea caught on with diet fans and dinnerware sellers, and serving food on red plates has become a trendy hack online.
