Question

Does a low-calorie meal pay off? Some dieters say that eating less at just one meal is ineffective, because people compensate by eating more at other meals, but a new study contradicts that argument. Below is an excerpt from a NY Times article on this study:
"For two weeks, researchers had 17 men and women eat all their meals and snacks, as much as they wanted, at a buffet where the exact quantities consumed could be weighed and caloric intake calculated. Then for the next two weeks, the participants ate a 200-calorie lunch, a commercially available food like a Kashi bar or a Lean Pocket. But the rest of the day, they ate whatever they wanted from the buffet.

Not counting lunch, the participants consumed 1,568 calories on days they had the 200-calorie lunch and 1,560 on days when they did not - an insignificant difference. But over all, they consumed 245 fewer calories on low-calorie lunch days. The result of that - unsurprisingly - was weight loss: an average of 1.1 pounds per participant in two weeks."

What type of study is this?

(A) Experiment
(B) Observational study

Answer 1

A because your testing out the theories