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Most people underestimate their caloric intake, but is there an association between calorie underestimation and body-mass index? Researchers studied two cohorts of young adults, who estimated the number of calories in a self-selected fast-food meal they had just eaten (105 participants; mean BMI, 24; 41% overweight) or the number of calories in each of 15 experimenter-selected fast-food meals (40 participants; mean BMI, 23; 30% overweight).
The experimenters classified half the meals as small and half as large. Participants in both cohorts greatly underestimated the calorie content of large meals (self-selected meals by 38% [about 510 calories]; experimenter-selected meals by 23% [about 380 calories]), but they estimated the calorie content …