Colored Potato Chips Curb Overeating

Last week, my wife's employer had a function out at Fifth Third Ballpark in a suite for the WhiteCaps.  The one thing all of us agreed on was how tasty and addictive the potato chips were!  We couldn't stop eating them.  And eating them.  And eating them.

You know you've done it.  Once you start on something, it tastes so good, you just keep eating.

Well, researchers have found that putting colored potato chips into a canister will help stop that problem!

From the story on Yahoo.com:
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University gave students one of two types of Lays' Stackable potato chips. The first group was given a stack of chips with red dyed, edible potato chip dividers interspersed at several different intervals, suggesting serving sizes anywhere from 5 to 14 chips.The other group was given the traditional stack of potato chips with no edible dividers.

What the researchers found was that inserting colored potato chips at regular intervals in the stacks caused people to eat fewer chips overall. In fact, the group with the edible serving size dividers reduced their potato chip consumption by 50 percent. The results appear in the May issue of the Journal of Health Psychology.

"The colored chip did all the work," says Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study. "This study showed that segmenting foods gets people to eat less.

"People tend to eat what you put in front of them. If you put less in front of them and give them a signal, they will take it."