Recent research has underlined something that many people have suspected for some time namely that eating low fat snacks is actually making a lot of people overweight. The findings that were published in the Journal of Marketing Research and that were compiled by Cornell University saw that men and women would actually ingest more calories when they were buying low fat snacks when compared to buying the normal version of the same snacks. The findings saw that this was more likely of people who were obese or overweight.

The study authors also noted that if proper information was given on healthy serving sizes normal weight people would stop snacking so much, but the overweight people tended to eat more of the low fat snacks disregarding the information about the correct quantity to consume. All the participants were noted to have underestimated the number of calories that were in low fat snacks and therefore they overestimated the safe eating amount of the snacks.

Quite simply when the people were given a low calories snack that was say 20% less calories they would very often eat more than 20% extra of the food item. Also the researchers saw that many people equate low fat with low calorie that is definitely not the case.

Very often the low fat snacks had no significant difference in calorie amounts that the normal fat items and this means that by eating low fat food snacks you are often putting yourself in a comfort zone thinking that you have not actually consumed more calories but you would be better of eating the normal full fat version of the product because at least you would not eat as much.

The study authors reckon that overweight people consuming the low fat foods were eating in average about 90 calories more than the people who ate the normal fat version and this represented a 50% increase. Also normal weight people were not so easily led astray by the low fat idea and tended to consume on average an extra 30% more calories when eating low fat versions.