Can Eating With An Overweight Person Affect Your Eating Habits?

A new study has found that eating alongside overweight people might lead to you eating more than is necessary for you, according to the publication The West Side Story. 

The latest study, which was conducted at the University of Cornell and is published in the magazine Appetite, was reportedly led by Mitsuru Shimizu and suggests that eating together with someone who is overweight induces you to eat more unhealthy food, which makes you gain more weight. 

For the study, researchers had 82 people line up in eight groups for a lunch of pasta and salad. Each time, an actress would reportedly draw attention to herself by speaking loudly and would then serve herself, according to the website qz.com. 

Sometimes she would take a lot of pasta and less salad while in other cases she would take more salad than pasta. Sometimes she would even wear a "fat suit" while other times she didn't.

When the actress was wearing her "fat suit" the other people in line were reportedly seen taking more pasta, regardless of whether she took more pasta or salad, according to the media outlet. 

"These results demonstrated that people may eat larger portions of unhealthy food and smaller portions of healthy food when eating with an overweight person," explained the researchers. 

This particular effect has been studied before in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. 

"Activation of a negative stereotype (the overweight sterotype) is shown to lead to stereotype-consistent goal commitment (low health goal commitment), which partially explains increases in stereotype-conducive behavior (eating indulgent food," wrote researchers for the previous paper.