While you probably find comfort in eating certain foods and recognize the importance of eating’s social component, you would think that the amount you eat at a given meal would simply be a matter of dispelling hunger. If so, you don’t think like Brian Wansink, the one-time director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab and author of Mindless Eating.

Wansink has performed study after study to show that mental and emotional factors affect how much you eat at a single meal.

(Just so you know: This fall, 15 of Wansink’s studies were retracted and his position at Cornell changed, primarily because it was decided that he used questionable statistical techniques and failed to properly document and preserve research results. In response, Wansink has stated, “There was no fraud, no intentional misreporting, no plagiarism, or no misappropriation” and believes further scrutiny of his work will support this claim.)

In one of Wansink’s early experiments, for instance, he asked subjects to eat tomato soup until they felt full. Half of the subjects, however, were eating from special bowls designed to automatically refill slowly.

On average, the subjects given normal bowls consumed 11 ounces of soup. Yet every single subject eating from the bowls that automatically refilled ate at least 50 percent more than that.

One subject consumed nearly triple the normal-bowl average, 32 ounces.

In a similar study, Wansink had subjects serve themselves ice cream and eat as much as they wanted. Half were given larger bowls to use, however, and half were given smaller ones.

On average, the subjects using the bigger bowls ate 38 percent more.

Additional research by Wansink has established that people unconsciously eat more when food is served on larger plates, and they drink more from a squat glass than a slender one. A recent review of all the pertinent research besides Wansink’s, in fact, found that when the offered portion size is doubled, people consume about 35 percent more.

Such findings have made using smaller plates and slender glasses a common dieting strategy, but researchers at Deakin University in Australia recently tried a different approach. They used larger portions to see if they could get people to eat more good food.

In the study, the researchers offered either a large or small portion of healthful apple chips or unhealthful potato chips to 153 university students. The students given the larger portion — including the healthy apple chips — ate significantly more than the ones given the smaller portion.

Next, the researchers gave another 77 subjects a small or a large bag of baby carrots while they watched either a film about a restaurant — which included many scenes involving food — or a romantic comedy with no particular food references.

Regardless of the movie, those with the larger bag ate more of the healthful snack. Those who watched the film about the restaurant ate more carrots than the other viewers regardless of bag size, which further demonstrates the impact that the environment can have on eating or overeating.

Based on the results of the research that he led, professor Chris Dubelaar offers this in a Medical News Today article: “[P]arents trying to get their children to eat more veggies could serve up larger portions. This would also work for healthy snacks such as fruit or any food you want someone to eat more of.”

Dubelaar and the other researchers also suggested another approach: beginning meals with large portions of healthy food like soups and salads before offering children a smaller serving of fried meats, French fries, or deserts.

But here’s a somewhat related approach, I would warn against: employing any of the eating strategies that have emerged as a result of what’s call the 80/20 diet.

Years ago, when many bodybuilders attempted to get ripped without losing too much muscle, they would cut back on calories Monday through Saturday and then eat far more — including high-calorie, junk food “treats” — on Sunday.

The one-day increase in calories and simple carbohydrates was supposed to combat the decline in basal metabolic rate that naturally occurs to some degree during long-term dieting. Additionally, the surfeit of food increases eating’s thermic effect, the rate at which heat is produced and thereby calories wasted through digestion.

Whether or not a one-day binge actually works is complicated and a column for another day. What’s important to know now is that the 80/20 diet emerged from hardcore bodybuilding, something that most following an 80/20 are diet unlikely to do.

Another reason why 80/20 dieting is ultimately ineffective is because few dieters want to weigh the foods they eat. In studies that ask subjects to estimate calorie consumption for a given day, virtually all underestimate calories consumed significantly, some by nearly 50 percent.

Theoretically then, every intended 4000-calorie, fifth-day binge a bigger man might employ on the 80/20 diet could be closer to 6500 calories.

Additionally, many dieters alter the 80/20 concept and use it daily. This increases the chance to underestimate calories dramatically.