TV Dinners Favor Late Night Snacking, Study Reveals

If you’re thinking of catching up with your favorite show or the news while also having lunch or dinner, think again. A new study comes to show that women who eat in front of the television set are more likely to consume more calories later in the day.

Nutritionists have repeatedly warned that meals should be served in a dedicated room, either the kitchen or any other room that doesn’t have a TV in it.

Part of the pleasure of eating is actually savoring food, which is unlikely to happen if distractions from the television come in the picture.

To add insult to injury, TV dinners also favor late night snacking in women, the Daily Mail reports, because they can’t remember precisely what they had to eat, therefore, they tend to overindulge.

Researchers at the Macquarie University in Sydney divided female volunteers into two groups: each group was given 20 minutes to eat as much chocolate, crisps and cola as they wanted.

While women in one group were told to do that in front of a television set, the others were asked to eat their fill while doing nothing of the sorts.

After a while, women from both groups were sat down for another eating session, this time being served with sandwiches, biscuits, crackers and dip, says the British publication.

As it turns out, women from the group who had watched television during the previous sitting ate about 50 calories more than the others, while also not being able to recall accurately what they had eaten.

This has lead researchers to the conclusion that remembering what we eat is of paramount importance in terms of being full. Distractions prevent us from doing that, thus we tend to overeat.

“It may be that TV makes it harder to attend to interceptive signals, harder to attend to how much is being eaten, harder to consolidate memories of food intake and harder to recall them during a meal,” researchers say, as per the Mail.

They believe the same applies to men but they haven’t proved it yet: the male volunteers all ate the same, happy to be able to get a free meal, the Mail writes.