Weight Loss Tip: no.618
Blue plates may help you eat less during a meal.
Care to guess why?
Yup, studies have found that dining off blue dishware might possibly affect food intake because with the exception of blueberries and a very small handful of other foods, blue isn’t a color that’s naturally occurring in food in abundance. As such, the appetite neurons aren’t as stimulated by the color blue as they are by green, brown, and red, which the brain has been programmed to associate with food colors.
Thanks to blue’s relative absence in natural food, the appetite doesn’t have an automatic response toward the color that triggers the desire to eat. Instead, the color might actually have the opposite effect due to early humans learning to avoid food that was blue, black, or purple, as those colors were a sign that an item was possibly spoiled or poisoned and thus, harmful to health.
It’s on the ground of evolutionary development that research suggests that you have a likelihood of eating less from a blue dish than you would from one that was another color. But that’s not all. Also factoring into play is that when light colored food in particular, such as pasta or mashed potatoes, gets served on a dark plate, there’s higher contrast between the color of the food and the plate. This in turn makes the food stand out more and subconsciously tricks the brain into thinking there’s a larger portion of food on the plate. Comparatively, food just blends in on a plate when there’s less contrast, which has the effect of making a portion size look smaller, which in turn can make you eat more than needed.
Weight Loss Tip
no.618
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