Jeffrey Brunstrom
Jeffrey M. Brunstrom works on appetite at the University of Bristol and is the researcher behind expected satiation and expected satiety. Expected satiation is how full you expect a given portion to make you straight away. Expected satiety is how long you expect it to hold you. His programme found that both are learned from experience with the particular food, rise with familiarity, and predict the portion people serve themselves better than how much they like the food does.
Who they are
Brunstrom's contribution is to shift attention from what happens while you eat to what happens before you start. On his account the size of a meal is largely settled in advance, by a learned guess about what that food will do to you, and the guess is built from every previous encounter with it.
That has an obvious consequence: the guess is least reliable for unfamiliar foods, because there is no history to build it from. That is a description of how the system works, not a recommendation about what to eat.
Key papers
Brunstrom, J. M. (2011). "The control of meal size in human subjects: a role for expected satiety, expected satiation and premeal planning", Proceedings of the Nutrition Society. Abstract and review-level reading.
Brunstrom, J. M., et al. (2009). "How many calories are on our plate? Expected fullness, not liking, determines meal-size selection", Obesity. Abstract only.
Key ideas
Liking is not the variable people assume it is. How much someone enjoys a food predicts how much they serve themselves less well than how filling they expect it to be.
The meal is largely decided before it begins. That moves the useful intervention earlier than most advice puts it.
Because expectations are learned, they can be wrong, and they are most likely to be wrong for foods you have not met before.
This is the forward-looking half of the picture. The backward-looking half is meal memory, where the work belongs to Paul Rozin and Suzanne Higgs: what you remember eating shapes what you eat next.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Brunstrom, J. M. (2011). Proceedings of the Nutrition Society.
- Brunstrom, J. M., et al. (2009). Obesity.
- Vault note, 2026-09-11.