Fat waiters ‘can make us order more food’
EATING out in a restaurant can derail even the most committed of calorie-counters.
But it is not just the availability of delicious food that can destroy our willpower – it is the people who serve us, a study found.
Experts discovered we order far more food when the waiter or waitress is overweight.
‘Diners ordered significantly more items when served by heavy waiting staff with high body mass indexes, compared with waiting staff with low body mass indexes,’ said the researchers from Cornell University in New York and the Jena University in Germany.
‘Specifically, they were four times as likely to order desserts and they ordered 17.65 per cent more alcoholic drinks.’
The impact was the same regardless of the diner’s own body mass index (BMI). For the study, published in the journal Environment & Behaviour, the researchers observed interactions between nearly 500 diners and their servers, in 60 different restaurants.
They estimated the body mass index of each server and diner using a chart of 18 body types for each gender – which they said had been shown to be accurate in previous studies.
A low BMI was defined as below or equal to 25, and a high BMI was above 25, which fits with the NHS classification of 25 being overweight.
‘Diners may order and eat more food and beverages in the presence of a heavy person because a heavy person sets a social norm,’ the academics suggested. They recommended that, to lessen the impact of a server’s weight, diners should decide beforehand what to eat at a restaurant, or follow simple predetermined rules.
‘Rules of thumb might involve decision rules such as “don’t eat dessert for lunch” or “don’t order alcoholic beverages during weekdays”,’ they said.
Previous studies have found that loud music and bright lights in restaurants can also encourage us to eat more.
Listening to soft jazz, on the other hand, can cut intake, the Cornell researchers found.
The type of crockery on which food is served can also have an effect – the greater the contrast between the plate and the food, the less we tend to eat.