Food and Emotion: Adjusting food portion sizes into healthier directions while maintaining eating enjoyment

Summary

Portion sizes of foods offered to consumers have increased in the last decades at the same time as overweight and obesity levels have risen. Along with the increased portion sizes, the underlying perception of what constitutes an appropriate portion of food has become clouded for consumers.

This thesis described experiments studying the impact of different approaches of food portion size manipulations on hedonic responses and food-evoked emotions. We conducted five experiments in different contexts (i.e., laboratory controlled conditions, online, and real-life contexts) to measure the dynamics in appetite and hedonic responses as well as food-evoked emotions in response to foods that varied in their portion sizes. It was found that small portion sizes of indulgent foods are as equally pleasant as their regular potion sizes.