14 DAY TRIAL // Being blue is one thing, but just like all bad things, it doesn't come alone: it may also get you fat.
A recent study made at Cornell University points to the fact that people in a sad mood tend to take refuge in eating more of less-healthy comfort food than people experiencing happiness. But when offered nutritional information, warned sad people adjusted their food intake compared to happier ones.
The research team asked 38 subjects to watch either an upbeat, funny movie ("Sweet Home Alabama") or a depressing one ("Love Story") while throughout the viewings they were offered fatty, salty popcorn and seedless grapes. "After the movies were over and the tears were wiped away, those who had watched 'Love Story' had eaten 36 % more popcorn than those who had watched the upbeat 'Sweet Home Alabama,'" said Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing, Applied Economics and Management at Cornell. "Those watching 'Sweet Home Alabama' ate popcorn and popped grapes, but they spent much more time popping grapes as they laughed through the movie than they did eating popcorn."
Happy people seem willing to prolong their state on the short term, but take in consideration the long term and choose more healthy food (grapes). But depressed people just want to "jolt themselves out of the dumps" with a tasty snake that induces them a quick "bump of euphoria."
To investigate how nutritional information influences comfort-food intake, the team offered popcorn to subjects who completed some assignments, including irrelevant mental tasks, depictions of four things that made them happy (or sad) and reading short stories, either happy or sad.
Some subjects were informed about the nutritional value of popcorn, while the others were not. Sad people ingested twice as much popcorn as those feeling happy when uninformed, but when they received information, depressed people ate even less than happy people, whose consumption was not too much biased by the received information. "Thus, it appears that happy people are already avoiding consumption, and the presence of nutritional information does not drive their consumption any lower," said Wansink. "While each of us may look for a comfort food when we are either sad or happy, we are likely to eat more of it when we are sad," Wansink concluded.
"Since nutritional information appears to influence how much people eat when they are in sad moods, those eating in a sad mood would serve themselves well by checking the nutritional information of the comfort foods they choose to indulge themselves with."