Article: Variety of choice tempts people to continue eating

Can't choose? Gobble it all
Variety of choice tempts people to continue eating

Diets that are most successful are the most restrictive

J.M. HIRSCH
ASSOCIATED PRESS

CONCORD, N.H.‹Ed Glomb admits he gets a little carried away when faced
with the more than 150 all-you-can-eat options at his favourite
restaurant's Italian-American-Chinese-Japanese buffet .

"Everybody has a tendency to eat with their eyes," he said recently,
adding that he'd already eaten soup, shrimp and crab legs ‹ starters to
be followed by roast beef, potatoes and dessert. "It's a little bit of
this and a little bit of that."

But Glomb's tendency to pile it on at his favourite restaurant ‹ and
his rotund size ‹ may have as much to do with the number of choices on
the buffet table as the unlimited portions.

Call it the "salad bar effect." Studies suggest that variety increases
consumption. With monotonous meals, people eat until they are full. Add
variety, even different shapes of pasta, and they eat more.

Studies dating back to the 1960s have shown that variety can increase
calorie consumption an average of 25 per cent, notes Megan McCrory, a
nutrition scientist at Tufts University.

That has some researchers grappling with the global obesity epidemic
considering what role an often dizzying array of food choices might
play in expanding the collective waistline.

"Nutritionists have been wrong. We've been telling you for years
variety is important, but it's that variety that really helps to make
you fat," said Judith Stern, vice president of the American Obesity
Association.

The science may not be familiar to most people, but its effects
probably are.

It plays out "in restaurants when you're really stuffed to the brim and
you just can't have another bite," McCrory said. "Then the waiter
brings around the dessert cart ... There's always room for dessert.''

Blame it on so-called sensory specific satiety, a mental process that
makes food taste better at first but progressively less interesting as
a person continues to eat it. Switch to a new food and, even if the
person is full, it will be appealing.

Marketers know this. Coca-Cola sells nearly 400 different drinks,
Frito-Lay offers about 150 different chips and pretzels in the United
States alone, and Campbell's produces 170 soups.

"If all you have is chicken soup, you probably won't eat soup night
after night," said John Faulkner, a spokesman for the Campbell Soup
Company. "But the more varieties you have, the more of it you'll eat.''

Barbara Rolls, a professor of nutrition at Penn State University, said
this dietary trigger dates back to humanity's early days, when survival
was best served by a natural inclination to eat a variety of foods.

"It encourages you to switch from food to food," she said. "As
omnivores with a variety of nutrient requirements, we need to switch
from food to food and take in a lot of different nutrients. This is
actually an adaptive response."

Most researchers agree on the science behind sensory specific satiety.
Where they differ is on how it affects overall eating patterns and how
significantly it contributes to obesity.

Rolls and McCrory, two of the leading researchers in the field, think
it does.

"There's so much variety that especially when the variety tastes really
good we're more apt to go ahead and eat it, especially when it's
everywhere you turn," McCrory said.

The problem isn't just that people seek variety, but also that the
foods they are eating are high in calories, Rolls said. People learn as
children to prefer high-calorie foods because they satisfy cravings
quickly.

Rolls said it's a prescription for obesity ‹ easy access to a growing
variety of high-calorie foods paired with a natural inclination to eat
more of them.

And though obesity long has been considered an American problem, the
rest of the world is catching up. McCrory thinks that might be due to a
greater variety of foods becoming available in other nations,
especially calorie-dense items.

Availability of such foods overseas has increased dramatically.

An influx of variety has had a dramatic effect on Solomon Islanders in
the South Pacific, said Gary Miller, a professor of nutrition and
obesity at Wake Forest University.

He said 30 year ago the islanders' diet was limited mostly to what
could be produced locally. Trade has since introduced a torrent of
variety, especially calorie-dense foods previously absent from this
nation of 340,000 people. The country now has one of the highest
obesity rates in the world.

Richard Mattes, a nutrition professor at Purdue University, said it
isn't that simple. Though he agrees that variety prompts people to eat
more, he said studies have yet to prove the effect of sensory specific
satiety lasts beyond a particular meal.

In fact, some studies suggest that after a meal of variety-induced
excess, people compensate and eat less later, he said.

But Dr. Terry Maratos-Flier, head of obesity research at the Joslin
Diabetes Center in Boston, said that's generally only true with lean
people. Overweight people often don't compensate.

Mattes also questions whether variety is responsible for the global
spread of obesity. He said that more likely is due to sedentary
lifestyles and increased consumption of calorie-dense foods.

"Has variety really increased over say the last 20, 25 years? Yes,
there have been many new products introduced into the market place. But
that's not the measure," he said. "The measure is what are the number
of unique foods Americans ate during the 1970s and what is the number
of unique foods Americans are eating today?''

Maratos-Flier thinks people are eating a greater variety, but not
because there are more foods. She said low costs and ease of
transportation have made it easier for more people to eat more food,
and more types of food.

Researchers don't think food variety alone dooms people to being
overweight.

Sensory specific satiety can help people lose weight. The most
successful diets are the most restrictive ‹ the more people eat of one
food, the less they want it. As a result, they eat less and lose
weight.

"Even if you went on a doughnut diet, if that's all you had you would
undoubtedly lose weight because of monotony and lack of variety.
Obviously that's not a good idea," Rolls said.

But since human nature is working against it, such diets also are the
hardest to stick with.

Giving in to the urge for variety also can be good, as long as the food
choices are sound. Filling up on a variety of low-calorie foods leaves
less room for calorie dense-foods.

"You can't get rid of variety. People want 100 channels. They want
thousands of CDs and books. There's no policy that's going to get rid
of variety in foods," Maratos-Flier said. "What you need is education"
about good food choices.

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Diva
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There is no substitute for the right food