When one is too much

How many of you have gone to a restaurant, and gotten a plate full of food that was larger than your previous three meals combined? I'm willing to bet you didn't put too much thought into how much you were about to eat, after all, it was one meal, granted a little larger than you would normally eat. I'm also willing to bet that you were completely stuffed by the time you finished the meal. You just ran into a phenomenon called Unit Bias.

Unit Bias
Unit bias, as defined by the Wikipedia, is “the tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item with strong effects on the consumption of food in particular”. 1
Let's take food, according to the definition above, we will want to finish one unit of food when offered food. That doesn't sound so bad, after all, *a* unit is only one. That's where things start to get misleading, and people get in trouble. A unit may have many servings in it. The restaurant you went to above, there were about three servings on that one unit (plate).

Great, so we know that we are more likely to treat food as one unit rather than the actual number of servings it consists of. So, who decides what the acceptable size of a unit is? That would be your culture. The American culture, when faced with two differing sized units, will normally choose the largest unit. Progressively the acceptable size of a unit will increase, and the number of servings increase as well.

Why we choose the larger unit
Our ancestors had to face the possibility of starvation everyday, so they would often take as much of something as they could; it was a strategy that served them well. These days most people are not facing the possibility of starvation, but we still use the same strategy when dealing with our lives. The more we have, the safer we are. Don't forget the perceived added value of getting the larger unit, they might cost more, but they are cheaper per weight measure, so your money goes further.

Why unit bias is bad for your health
Unit bias will often times cause people to overeat without knowing that they are doing so. Overeating can cause people to become overweight. Being overweight can cause many health problems. There are plenty of articles out there that describe the possible problems of being overweight.

What you can do to fight unit bias
The time when unit bias becomes a problem is when the unit gets to be too large. So the secret is to use smaller units, easier said than done; but here are some suggestions that should help you.

You can control the size of the unit much easier when you are eating at home. So naturally, eat at home as often as you can, this has the added bonus that you can control exactly what goes into your food. The easiest way to control unit bias at home is to purchase smaller units when you go shopping, get the cans of pop rather than the the larger 20oz bottles, purchase the smaller packages of pre-packaged foods, only purchase what you will need for the next two days, and carry around a basket, don't push that large cart. The second easiest way to control unit bias, is to cook smaller amounts of food; but for this to work you should get smaller plates, bowls, and glasses, otherwise you will feel that you have not received your full unit of food, and will often times want more.

Eating out can make controlling unit bias more difficult, you don't really control what goes on your plate, or how large the unit will be. Fortunately there are some simple tips to help control how large your unit is. When ordering from the menu, look and see how large the serving is, order the 8oz steak rather than the whole cow. Ordering from a different section of the menu will often times provide you with smaller servings, the children's, senior's, or the lunch menus are great places to find smaller servings. Ask for your beverage to be served in a smaller glass. If all else fails, when you order, ask them to split the meal in the kitchen, and package half of it to go.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Copyright © 2007 by Duane Hubbard