How much cereal do you eat? If the type of cereal you have for breakfast has smaller flakes, then you may be consuming far more than you intended. Scientists have discovered that the size of cereal flakes influences how much a person will eat.
"People have a really hard time judging appropriate portions," said Barbara Rolls, professor of nutritional sciences at Penn State, in a news release. "On top of that you have these huge variations in volume that are due to the physical characteristics of foods, such as the size of individual pieces, aeration and how things pile up in a bowl. That adds another dimension to the difficulty of knowing how much to take and eat."
In order to see how difficult this might be, the researchers reduced the flake size of a breakfast cereal by crushing the flakes with a rolling pin. Then, they recruited 41 adults to eat cereal for breakfast and tested the amount of cereal they decided to pour into a bowl. In the end, the scientists found some surprising results.
"When faced with decreasing volumes of cereal, the people took less cereal," said Rolls in a news release. "Yet, even though they thought they were taking the same number of calories, they ended up significantly overeating."
The findings have implications for portion selection and dietary advice. In fact, it reveals that the way cereal piles up in a bowl can impact the amount of calories a person consumes. This means that two cups of a certain cereal may not be equal to two cups of a similar cereal that's simply made with smaller pieces.
When you're eating your morning breakfast cereal, make sure to be careful to look at how much you eat. You could be consuming far more calories than you expected, simply because your cereal is a bit more broken up than usual.
