Issue date: 3/4/04 Section: Aggielife

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - On a brisk fall morning, professor Brian Wansink welcomed four graduate students to his lab for what they thought was a taste test of tomato soup.

Unbeknown to the students, two of the four soup bowls were rigged to remain full, fed by hidden tubes. Twenty minutes later, the two students were surprised to learn their bowls had supply holes in the bottom and that they had eaten a third more than their colleagues.

That test is one of the experiments the University of Illinois' Wansink has conducted to figure out why people often eat more than they should.

Several industries are under pressure to figure out why so many Americans are overweight and what can be done about it.

Wansink is among researchers studying how external factors from packaging to advertising to dining companions influence eating behavior.

Experiments show that people do not necessarily stop eating when their stomachs tell them to.

"People believe they're pretty good at calibrating what they eat," said Wansink, 43, who studies the psychology of food. "I don't think they are. I think they rely on benchmarks, essentially the fill level of the bowl. There tends to be this visual cue that you're full."

During two years of Wansink's soup experiment, students with bottomless bowls tended to eat 40 percent more than test subjects with regular bowls.

"I wasn't aware of it," said Nina Huesgen, one of the students with a trick bowl. "That's why I feel so filled up, I guess."

Jason Stokes, who was similarly duped, said, "I did notice that my bowl level wasn't going down very much, but I thought that was because I wasn't eating very much."

The soup test is one of the methods Wansink has used to show that people often struggle to control their eating. People will shovel in a bucket of popcorn even if it's stale, and they'll gobble one candy after another if it's within arm's reach, Wansink has found.

The research by Wansink, a professor of marketing, nutritional science and agricultural economics, is particularly relevant because recent studies have shown that portions in restaurants and in homes have increased in the last few decades, most notably in "super-size" fries and soft drinks offered by fast-food restaurants.

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