Serving Up Obesity in Canada

Can we blame Canadian obesity ?on overweight servers? “Would you like to supersize that?” Next time you’re tempted to up your order at the food counter, take a close look at who is offering. According to a UBC marketing study, your decision may be as likely determined by the heft of your server as by any tempting packaging or catchy marketing slogans.?

Can we blame Canadian obesity  on overweight servers?

“Would you like to supersize that?” Next time you’re tempted to up your order at the food counter, take a close look at who is offering. According to a UBC marketing study, your decision may be as likely determined by the heft of your server as by any tempting packaging or catchy marketing slogans. 

Marketers have long known that buying decisions are influenced by external cues, such as the width of a shopping aisle or the height of a product’s placement. Marketing professor Darren Dahl theorized that one of those cues is the girth of our food servers. Our society’s ever-expanding waistlines, he suggests, might be self-perpetuating: the more we eat the fatter we get, and the fatter our servers get the more we eat. 

Dahl and graduate student Brent McFerran hired undergrad Yun Li to help them test the theory. (McFerran has since become a marketing professor at the University of Michigan; Li is now a UBC law school student.) The five-foot-two-inch, 105-pound, size-zero Li was fitted with a fat suit that gave her the appearance of an 180-pound, size-16 server. Under strictly controlled scientific conditions, Li offered unknowing test subjects various food options, both as a skinny server and as a fat server, and tested for quantities of food chosen as well as types of food. 

The result: dieting women, in particular, identify with overweight servers and are likely to up their calorie intake. “Ironically, if you’re someone who’s at risk and you’re trying to lose weight, that’s the person who’s going to be impacted the most in terms of the person who advises,” says Dahl. “Our argument is that it’s probably because they identify at some level with this at-risk population.” 

Dahl reports that his research was spurred by the alarming increase in obesity among Canadians. “You see stories in the papers every day about obesity,” he notes. “This research is looking at the external cues around you that might influence you in a consumption environment.” 

According to Statistics Canada, 24 per cent of Canadian adults are obese today, compared to just 14 per cent in 1979. (While we tend to feel smug in comparison to our American neighbours, the gap isn’t as big as we might think: 34 per cent of Americans adults are obese.) 

The UBC study, funded by a federal research grant, has profound implications, says Dahl. For one thing, he hopes it will help empower consumers, alerting them to the subtle factors that influence their consumption decisions. 

But there may also be a lesson in it for restaurant owners. Those skinny young women in skimpy dresses may be great for ambience, but they’re not going to sell a lot of burgers. 