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"  What is your eating utensil of choice? Is it a dainty salad fork? Or is it more along the lines of a pitchfork? A recent study published in The Journal of Consumer Research suggests that people eat less when they use larger forks. More from Delish: Four Painless Ways to Improve Your Diet The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Utah, was meant to investigate how bite size affected how much people ate in one sitting. The research took place in a local Italian restaurant in the Southwestern United States. Tables were divided up by fork size. At one group of tables diners would eat with small forks while at another set of tables, larger forks that held 20 percent more food than their counterparts would be used. The forks had been pretested to make sure that their size did not cause the diners to exert any more effort to eat than usual. More from Delish: Easy Mediterranean Diet Tips During the study, the food was served to patrons by two research assistants. After diners had eaten their fill the waitstaff retrieved the plates, weighed them, and labeled them, indicating how much had been eaten and with which fork. The results suggested that those who ate with the big forks ate less than those who ate with the small forks (4.43 ounces versus 7.91 ounces on average). This went against the researchers&amp;#039; expectations, as previous studies had found that eating from small plates causes people to eat less than eating from large plates. But the correlation between utensils and dishes, it seems, is non-existent. The study hypothesizes that, &amp;quot;The physiological feedback of feeling full, or the satiation signal, comes with a time lag. ... Hence, in the absence of physiological feedback, diners focus on the visual cue of whether they are making any dent in the amount of food on their plates to assess goal progress. The smaller fork (compared to the larger fork) appears to provide less satisfactory goal progress; that is, diners feel they are not making much of a dent in consuming their food, and hence, satisfying their hunger. This, in turn, focuses diners to put in more effort (e.g., more forkfuls) toward satiating their hunger.&amp;quot; More from Delish: Diet-Friendly Dinners Look out South Beach, we predict that Big Fork is the soon to be hottest fad diet. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.delish.com/cooking/nutrition/news/a16312/study-suggests-people-eat-less-with-big-forks/>