11 Ways Food Marketing Can Make You Fat

You probably feel in your gut -- literally -- that food marketing can make you fat. The fact that we're constantly exposed to ads for various products must, surely, make us eat more. People often think of commercials on TV as our main path to their messages. But in fact, we're exposed to food marketing, broadly defined, all the time. That makes it hard to keep track of all the ways food marketing can increase obesity.

Luckily, we don't have to. Because Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink, a pair of researchers affiliated with the Cornell Food & Brand Lab has done it for us. For the lead article in the October 2012 issue of Nutrition Reviews journal, they conducted an exhaustive search food marketing-related literature to discover the "myriad of ways in which food marketing influences consumption volume and, hence, may promote obesity." They boiled a whopping 269 articles down to 23 pages of conclusions.

But that's 23 pages of very small type! So we've done them one better (or worse, depending on your stance on these things) and distilled their article down to 11 of the most surprising ways food marketing can make us fat. Click through the slideshow below to find out: