Scientists Nükhet Taylor and Theodore Noseworthy said their findings of research suggested that sharing snacks or small plates at restaurants with family and friends may actually be encouraging 'excessive caloric intake' by leading people to underestimate how fattening the food is.
This perceived lack of ownership when sharing food means people 'mentally decouple calories from their consequences' Canadian scientists have suggested. They also found that losing this judgment of how fatty a food is when sharing makes diners want to eat more given that they viewed it as a 'free' meal. The researchers believe that this perceived lack of ownership over shared food makes the calories feel inconsequential, possibly due to what is known as 'mental accounting' - a process which allows consumers to use mental accounts to keep track of monetary expenses and caloric budgets.
They believe that it may be that consumers do not include the calories they have consumed from sharing food in their caloric budgets because they believe those calories do not belong to them.
In their study, they carried out three experiments with 719 people. In one experiment, they found that people found chips shared with a friend from one plate 15 per cent less fattening than the same amount of chips on separate plates.
When dining alone, they found chips 18 per cent less fattening, despite the fact that the calories were exactly the same. Even with healthy snacks, the same amount of almonds were perceived as being 22 per cent less fattening when shared with a friend, compared to when dining alone.
Those within the experiment were also given chocolate, which they found 20 per cent less
fattening when eaten from a shared bowl compared to when eaten alone. It meant that for both healthy and unhealthy snacks, sharing reduced the perceived fattening of the foods.
'Our findings suggest that food sharing may be encouraging excessive caloric intake by leading consumers to underestimate the fattening potential brought on by shared food consumption,' the study concluded.
