Eric Robinson
Eric Robinson is an appetite researcher at the University of Liverpool and the most useful sceptic in the field of eating behaviour. He pooled the evidence for an effect, then published failures to find it, then declined to support a popular claim his own field liked. He appears three times in this publication's research on eating, pointing in three different directions, which is exactly why he is worth trusting.
Who they are
Robinson works on how attention, memory and the eating environment shape how much people eat. Much of his output takes the form of meta-analysis, which means pooling the results of many separate studies to get a single estimate that no individual study could support on its own.
His 2013 review covered attentive eating, the idea that paying attention to a meal while you eat it, and remembering it afterwards, reduces how much you eat later. His 2014 review covered eating rate. His 2018 paper reported two laboratory experiments that failed to find the focused-attention effect at all. And his work on dishware is the reason the claim that smaller plates make people eat less is not treated here as established.
Key papers
Robinson, E., et al. (2014). "A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the effect of eating rate on energy intake and hunger", American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 100(1), 123 to 151. First author.
Robinson, E., Aveyard, P., Daley, A., Jolly, K., Lewis, A., Lycett, D., & Higgs, S. (2013). "Eating attentively", American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 97(4), 728 to 742. First author. The pooled case that attention and memory at a meal affect later intake.
Robinson, E., et al. (2018). "No effect of focused attention whilst eating on later snack food intake: two laboratory experiments", Appetite. First author. Two null results on his own earlier finding.
His work on dishware, which found no consistent effect of plate or bowl size on how much people eat.
Key ideas
The single most useful thing he has established here: slowing people down changes how much they eat at that meal, and does not change how hungry they are up to three and a half hours later. The saving is real, and in the short term it does not get clawed back.
Portion size and plate size are not the same claim. The first is well supported. The second is not, largely because of his work. Anyone who runs them together is borrowing credibility from one to prop up the other.
Publishing your own nulls is rare, and it is the behaviour that makes the rest of an output trustworthy. His 2018 paper undercuts a finding he had previously pooled in favour of.
The honest summary of his programme is that attention at a meal probably does something, that the something is smaller and less reliable than the popular version, and that the wider environment does more work than the plate does.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Robinson, E., et al. (2014). American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 100(1), 123 to 151.
- Robinson, E., et al. (2013). American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 97(4), 728 to 742.
- Robinson, E., et al. (2018). Appetite.
- Vault note, 2026-09-11.