New Study Suggests How to Stop Mindless Eating

One of the reasons that lie behind the ever-increasing rates of overweight and obesity are bad eating habits. A recent study reveals that people won’t stop eating even when the food has a bad taste, and also proposes one way to fight this habit.

Mindless eating has been identified as a serious problem in today’s world, as many people find themselves eating junk food in front of the television, at their work desk, or even in the car.

The researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have tied these bad eating habits with the environment, showing that people keep eating even when they are not hungry or do not like the food.

They gave people about to enter a movie theater a bucket of either just-popped, fresh popcorn or stale, week-old popcorn. The findings showed that participants ate about the same amount of popcorn, whether it was fresh or stale.

“When we’ve repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and make us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present,” said lead author David Neal.

Another set of participants who were given fresh and stale popcorn were watching movie clips in a meeting room. As a setting rather unusual for eating popcorn, it mattered a lot if the popcorn tasted good.

"The results show just how powerful our environment can be in triggering unhealthy behavior,” Neal said. “Sometimes willpower and good intentions are not enough, and we need to trick our brains by controlling the environment instead.”

Finally, the researchers at the USC decided to find out what would happen if they would simply disrupt the automatic eating habits. In another movie theater experiment, they asked participants to use their non-dominant hand to perform the action.

Once again given fresh or stale popcorn, using the non-dominant hand seemed to disrupt eating habits and cause people to pay attention to what they were eating.

Thus, researchers do not recommend avoiding or altering the environments each associates with mindless eating, but change the habit pattern using simple techniques, such as switching the hand they use to eat.