Imagine a fast food chain that can boast that they've just made their food 25% less fattening without changing either the food or the portion sizes!
In theory, it should be possible for a fast food chain to do exactly that - just by changing the packaging. The result will be an overweight person's dream - if they are used to eating until they feel sated, they will now feel just as full after eating less food, and as an added bonus they will probably have enough to take home for another meal.
The first chain to introduce such a change stands to draw large numbers of customers away from competing chains. (In fact, they could gain market share even among people who are not overweight - because many of those individuals will be coming in with family members of friends, and even very small groups are likely to contain other individuals who would wish to take advantage of the change.)
All that would be necessary is special "diet" packaging: The food would be divided into two portions, and one portion would either have an opaque lid over it, or be in a separate closed container.
Of course, that small change seems unlikely to have such a dramatic effect. However, it's obvious that the mere sight of food makes us feel hungry - and scientists have shown that people feel hungrier whenever there is more food on their plate. It's an ancient survival mechanism that's now harmful rather than helpful when fast food portions are supersized: Put a 6-inch sub in front of someone, and they may feel full when they've eaten 5 inches, but put a 12-inch sub in front of the same person and they may not feel full until they've eaten 7 or 8 inches. However, if the chain had simply cut the 12-inch sub in half and hidden the second half in a separate bag, it appear likely that the person's subconscious would not have counted it...
Any fast food chain that wished to measure the effectiveness of the new packaging before springing it on its competition should be able to do so by retaining the services of any university laboratory that studies the psychological factors affecting food consumption. (These include the laboratories of Dr. Brian Wansink at Cornell University and Dr. Barbara Rolls at Penn State University.)
Other chains would be likely to follow suit, but the first chain should have the advantage long enough to generate free publicity in the mass media, and to build up goodwill among many of its own customers and those who switch.
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An overweight person shouldn't be eating fast food in the first place. Losing weight is about a a dedicated lifestyle change.
No doubt you'd gain people who wanted to lose weight and not have to do any work or make any changes. The same people who fail to lose weight, or gain it back shortly after losing some. A fool and his money are easily parted, and that's fine; just don't buy into the lie yourself.
The portion control you are talking about only helps people who made the dedicated effort to change. If they ALREADY made that decision, it doesn't matter what a chain offers. They've already decided on a plan of action and intend to carry it out.
As someone who has played the weight loss game I can assure you that people don't go to the joint that serves the smallest stuff... We go where they serve the best tasting stuff. Simply reducing serving size ain't gonna attract customers. If that were the case they would already be buying what they wanted and tossing the rest.
Novelty might draw some but from the adveritsing I see currently (especially Burger King) seems to lean in the other direction... "Eat till your heart pops." Good idea on paper but not sure the added cost of packaging would be covered by dieters eatting fast food.
A clarification:Since it costs a fast food chain almost as much to prepare a small portion as a large one, there's not enough incentive to sell reasonable sizes, so we either need to force the issue or create an incentive.With "Out of sight, out of mind" packaging, the portion size stays exactly the same, but anyone eating it will get full much sooner. With current packaging, they would have had to stop while still hungry if they wanted to limit themselves to that same number of calories - so they get the same effect with less willpower, or more effect for the same amount of willpower. (If they decide to save the rest for another whole meal, that's an added plus for them.)
Because we all know how much the FDA loves psychological experiments that rely on misinformation.
Does it ever occur to anyone that it is possible to order a single hamburger, or a small drink? Heck most fast food chains have salads for crying out loud! Quit pushing this "The company made me eat to much" crap on the rest of us.