The taste of our food is affected by the weight, size, shape, and even the colour of the cutlery we use to eat it.
Our perception of how food tastes is influenced by cutlery, new research published in the Flavour Journal suggests.
The flavour can be affected by the size, weight, shape and colour of the cutlery used, all can have an effect, said the University of Oxford team.
Cheese tastes saltier when eaten from a knife rather than a fork; while white spoons make yoghurt taste better, experiments show.
The study suggests that the brain makes judgements on food even before it goes in the mouth. For those of us that work with the complexities of the mind and the way it works with food this is no real surprise, especially when it comes to losing weight. When people go on a diet all sorts of changes occur within the brain. The brain increases and decreases certain hormones that actually increase the motivation to find and consume more food, whilst at the same time stop us feeling full.
More than 100 students took part in three experiments looking at the influence of weight, colour and shape of cutlery on taste.
The researchers found that when the weight of the cutlery conformed to expectations, this had an impact on how the food tastes.
It is not just the cutlery that affects the brain. We know that as the levels of obesity have risen, so has the size of our plates. Think about the size of your grandmother’s plates, they were probably a lot smaller than the plates that you eat your dinner off. Previous research has shown that people generally eat less when food is served on smaller plates.
For some people the sight of a really full plate of food can be off putting. This is rarely the case with people who over eat. However, suppose we could change the behaviours of people who are overweight so that they felt put off by large portions of food. This is just one of the ways that hypnotherapy for weight loss can help.
When we help people to lose weight we get them to change their behaviours. Those behaviours can be varied and no two clients are the same. That is why any programme that does that uses a standard formula like, gastric band hypnotherapy is unlikely to enjoy consistent results. That is not what a professional lose weight hypnotherapy programme is about. It is important to look at the particular behaviours of each client, whether they want to lose a stone or 5 stone, and change the behaviours that need to be changed for them.