Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

The Wageningen University in the Netherlands has what they call the Restaurant of the Future. They watch your every move while you eat to learn why we overeat and what causes it.

• Restaurant of the Future May Unravel Reasons Behind Overeating

The name is not just bombast, because in addition to a staff of talented chefs, the restaurant is home to some of the world’s leading nutrition and psychology researchers. These researchers watch patrons from a secret control room, measuring portion and bite sizes, eye movements, and anything else that they feel might hold a clue to the often puzzling eating habits of humans. An intricate system of hidden cameras, heat sensors, and scales makes the restaurant an extremely versatile laboratory.

Food research has focused on selling in the past. How can we sell more food? How can we get people to eat more? How can we make it taste better to more people? That’s because a lot of research is funded by the companies that sell food. They want to sell more. They don’t care whether we get fat in the process.

I don’t know what the research focus of the Restaurant of the Future is. Their website is VERY generic. It seems like they are just building it and hoping researchers will come. If they are depending on funding from outside sources, then I suspect they won’t find out what makes us obese and merely find out how to make us fatter.