What is the Buffet Effect?

Today we’re going to explain the buffet effect, or put another way: why we continue eating despite feeling full.

We often hear the following phrase from health professionals:

“…Eat a varied diet…”

This has a clear practical justification: if we eat from a variety of food groups, the chances of nutritional deficiencies in micronutrients are reduced, while ensuring the inclusion of favourable nutrients such as fibre or phytonutrients.

The more variety, the more we eat

Have you ever asked why we eat more at a free buffet?

The reason behind this truth lies in a feature of our central nervous system called habitation.

The more times we are exposed to a stimulus in a given period of time, the less we will respond to it.

If you only eat potato, your interest in the potato will gradually decrease until you hate it.

Imagine you’re travelling by car in the North of Spain and you see a purple cow.

You no longer respond to the stimulus.

Palatability test

In 1981, Barbara Rolls and collaborators evaluated this phenomenon in a study: they asked volunteers to report the palatability of 8 different foods, trying a small amount of each.

Hours after lunch, the volunteers re-evaluated the palatability of the same 8 meals, and what the researcher found was that the palatability of the seven meals they had not had for lunch was much higher than the food they had had for lunch.

The good, in small doses, is twice as good

Sound familiar?

Barbara Rolls called this specific sensory satiety phenomenon, a type of satiety selective towards foods with the same organoleptic properties as those we just tested.

In short, at a buffet (or in our daily lives) we tend to eat more than we need, even if the food’s not the best in the world, because (among other things) we don’t have time to get used to a particular meal.

Few people repeat dishes in this situation. It’s normal to try as many dishes as possible.

What’s this about the second stomach?

This is the mysterious reason why some people (most) have what they call “a second stomach” or the “dessert stomach”.

I’m sure you’ve seen yourself more than once in this type of scenario:

Suddenly, the waiter comes over and whispers: “we have fried milk, rice pudding or mille-feuille for dessert, would you like some?”.

Specific Sensory Satiety

This is the reason why.

The organoleptic characteristics of the dessert (sweet taste, showy presentation, smell), and with it being a new element in today’s food (you are not used to it), make your satiety decrease only for that food.

Availability of food ad libitum

The most obvious is the accessibility of the food.

In a free buffet you can eat what you want and you’re not going to pay more for it.

We’ve broken another barrier: the economic one.

The simple thought:

What can we do?

If we have understood what specific sensory satiety consists of, we’ll understand that the solution involves doing what very few are willing to do (and even less so in a free buffet): limiting the supply and diversity of food.

Example: a maximum of 5 different dishes, including desserts.

Conclusions

The buffet is a mirror of Western culture.

In it, we find an incredible variety of hyper palatable foods, visually striking and accessible (you only pay once at the buffet).

This is the perfect recipe for overeating.

Day after day, this chronic surplus is deteriorating our mechanisms of reward and hunger-satiety, hypertrophying our adipose tissue and setting the ground for the appearance of all kinds of chronic non-communicable diseases.

We’ll see you in the next post. And keep on empowering!

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