Pay Attention

Over 60% of America is overweight or obese and the UK isn’t trailing too far behind either. Furthermore, depending on which statistics you choose to look at there are projections that near enough everybody will be obese in the not too distant future. So why is everybody so fat? The obvious answer is that energy intake (how much food you eating) and energy expenditure (how many calories you are burning) are imbalanced. Which is a shame because obesity is quite a big health problem. With it often comes heart problems, type two diabetes or even an early grave. Additionally, even if you aren’t obese, sitting next to a very large person on a long distance flight is unpleasant. Nobody is a winner when it comes to obesity. Although there are many mechanisms by which people end up over eating this blog will describe some research that suggests that a lack of attention and failing memory may be contributing to bigger waist sizes and broken scales.

A study by Wansink and colleagues (2006) helps to underline one of these ideas well. During the Superbowl the researchers invited some university students to a free Superbowl party (very kind). At the party was of course a big screen with the game on, but also free drinks and a chicken wing buffet. Participants were invited to go to the buffet as many times as they liked, pick up some wings and then return to their tables to enjoy the game and food. However, there were also some waitresses involved. Tables of participants were assigned to one of two conditions. In the first condition the waitresses would clear the plates of chicken wing bones as they mounted up. In the second condition the waitresses were instructed to leave the plates on the table. So half the participants were surrounded by evidence of the amount of food they had eaten (in the form of bones) and the other half were reliant on their memory of how much they had eaten. Why do this? The idea here was that by leaving the bones on some tables this would direct attention towards how much each individual had eaten. Whereas, constantly clearing the plates has essentially the opposite effect.

The difference this made was fairly substantial. Having the bones as a reminder of food intake resulted in these participants consuming around a third less than participants that had their tables continuously cleared. The dirty plates appeared to serve as a record of how much had been eaten and informed participants whether to over eat and go back for more. Thus, having reminders of what food we have eaten might be rather useful, as our memory for fine detail can be questionable. For example, buffet style restaurants evoke a tendency to horrendously over-eat. Although greed probably has something to do with it, a failure to recognise and register how many of those very average tasting prawn crackers you’ve already put away may also be fuelling further overeating.

Television viewing also appears to be a bit of a problem in relation to obesity. Watching TV doesn’t burn many calories but there are further problems, especially if you are eating whilst channel surfing. An ample number of studies have shown that putting a bowl of M&Ms or popcorn in front of a person watching TV is a bad idea. Watching television serves as a distraction from eating. You aren’t monitoring what you are eating and because of this intake will tend to increase dramatically. Attention is on the television screen and not to how much you’ve eaten or how hungry you are. But the effects don’t end there. Watching TV whilst eating lunch at midday may even cause a degree of over eating later on in the day. Dr Suzanne Higgs (my PhD supervisor and very nice person) devised a clever experiment underlining this point. Participants came into the lab and ate a standardised lunchtime meal. Some ate the lunch and watched TV, others ate in the absence of TV. Later on in the afternoon all participants returned and were asked to take part in a mock ‘taste test’ which would involve tasting some cookies and making ratings about them. Luckily there were a lot of cookies and participants were told that after completing the ratings they could eat as many of them as they liked. Of course, there was more to it than that. The taste test was a cover story and what the researchers were really interested in was how many of the cookies participants chose to eat.

The results indicated that participants that had eaten the lunchtime meal whilst watching TV ate significantly more cookies than those who ate in the absence of TV. Why? The likely explanation is memory. The theory being that participants who had watched TV would have paid little attention to the meal and therefore have a reduced recollection of how much they’d actually eaten at lunchtime. This in turn resulted in participants overeating later on because when making decisions about how much we should eat we are reliant on our memory of recent intake. Yet, if that memory is not particularly accurate then we end up eating more than we would normally

Paying attention to what one is eating would therefore appear to be important in both the short term (how many times have I been up to the buffet?) and perhaps more unexpectedly the long term too (how big was that cake I had at lunch?).

Application

Be mindful about what you are eating.