Variety beefs up consumption, studies say

CONCORD, N.H. — Ed Glomb admits he gets a little carried away when faced with the more than 150 all-you-can-eat options on the Red Apple Buffet's Italian-American-Chinese-Japanese menu.

"Everybody has a tendency to eat with their eyes," he said recently, adding that he'd already eaten soup, shrimp and crab legs — starters to be followed by roast beef, potatoes and dessert. "It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that."

But Glomb's tendency to pile it on at his favorite restaurant — and his rotund size — may have as much to do with the number of choices on the buffet table as the unlimited portions being offered.

Call it the "salad bar effect." Studies suggest that variety increases consumption. With monotonous meals, people eat until they are full. Add variety, even something as subtle as different shapes of pasta, and they eat more.

Studies dating back to the 1960s have shown that variety can increase calorie consumption an average of 25 percent, according to Megan McCrory, a nutrition scientist at Tufts University.

That has some researchers grappling with the global obesity epidemic considering what role an often dizzying array of food choices might play in expanding the collective waistline.

"Nutritionists have been wrong. We've been telling you for years variety is important, but it's that variety that really helps to make you fat," said Judith S. Stern, vice president of the American Obesity Association.

The science may not be familiar to most people, but its effects probably are.

It plays out "in restaurants when you're really stuffed to the brim and you just can't have another bite," McCrory said. "Then the waiter brings around the dessert cart. . . . There's always room for dessert."

Blame it on so-called sensory specific satiety, a mental process that makes food taste better at first but progressively less interesting as a person continues to eat it. Switch to a new food and, even if the person is full, it will be appealing.

Marketers know this. Coca-Cola sells nearly 400 different drinks, Frito-Lay offers about 150 different chips and pretzels in the United States alone, and Campbell's produces 170 soups.

"If all you have is chicken soup, you probably won't eat soup night after night," said John Faulkner, a spokesman for the Campbell Soup Company. "But the more varieties you have, the more of it you'll eat."