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This simple experiment shows why people eat too much over the holidays

Smörgåsbord
Magdanatka/Shutterstock

The smörgåsbord gets you every time.

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Take it from Christina Agapakis, who describes a formative experiment on overeating in an essay at Popular Science. She writes:

The variety-induced overeating typical of holidays is known as the “smörgåsbord effect,” and was first identified in 1956 by the French physiologist Jacques Le Magnen. To study the effects of food flavors on appetite, Le Magnen made tiny feasts for rats. When he fed the rats unlimited amounts of a single type of food, they would eat until they felt full, and then stop. But when he gave the rats a smörgåsbord with four different flavors of rat chow, the rats would eat about three times as much as normal, filling up again on each new flavor.

Want to avoid overeating? Here are some psychological tips.

Diet Psychology
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