The Psychology Of Limiting Soda Sizes
Restaurant Soda Nomadic Lass on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0Some fun reading about how, psychologically, New York's proposed soda ban was supposed to work As we either celebrate or mourn the New York Supreme Court's striking down of the soda size limit in New York City, let's take a moment to remember the psychology behind the ban, which is truly weird. There's an overwhelming number of studies that show that people seem to base how much they eat on the amount of food or drink they're given, not how full they actually are. And portion sizes, of course, have increased dramatically over the past few decades. In 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a document about the research into portion sizes. Experiments with mac and cheese, sandwiches, pasta entrees, potato chip bags, bags of popcorn and trick refilling soup bowls all showed that people ate more when given more. Often,...