Counting Bones: Environmental Cues That Decrease Food Intake

Abstract

At an all-you-can eat buffet in a sports bar, it was tested whether people would eat less if they knew how much they had already eaten. 50 graduate students (34 women; M age = 24.1 yr.) were seated at 21 tables randomly assigned to be bussed (leftover wings removed) or unbussed (wings left on table). The 31 students at the bussed tables ate more than those at the unbussed tables (7 wings vs. 5.5 wings), with the effect being stronger for men than women. In distracting eating environments, environmental cues may provide an effective means of reducing consumption. Implications for controlling alcohol intake were also noted.

Eating attentively: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of food intake memory and awareness on eating

“…Studies used very different methods to decrease awareness of food being eaten. For example, a study by Scheibehenne et al (30) removed awareness of food being consumed during lunch by having participants eat lunch in a darkened room and Wansink and Payne's study (9) reduced awareness by removing used plates from the participants' tables in a restaurant buffet setting. The studies examined both snack intake and meal intake.…”

“…Four studies examined the effect of decreasing awareness of consumption on food intake during eating (9,(29)(30)(31). Two studies reported BMI and mean BMI was in the healthy range for both (30,31).…”

“…This raises the possibility that "attentiveeating" interventions targeting these cognitive processes could be effective in helping weight loss without the need for effortful calorie monitoring. For example, avoiding distraction and increasing awareness of food as it is eaten (8,9), alongside simple recall of foods eaten at the last eating occasion, would be predicted to decrease food intake at the next eating opportunity (10). One theory is that such processes serve to enhance episodic memory representation of food consumed, which is used to inform subsequent decisions about how much to eat (7,10).…”

Anorexia, undernutrition, weight loss, sarcopenia, and cachexia of aging

“…Many of the orexigenic neuropeptides, which decline with aging, may play an important role in the anorexia with aging [55,57,68,80]. It is widely known that anorexia with aging makes the old people at major risk for having severe decreases in food intake [7,51,87].…”

Alcohol Availability and Neighborhood Characteristics in Los Angeles, California and Southern Louisiana

“…There is a substantial literature that documents how food and alcohol availability directly relate to consumption patterns. [31][32][33] One way to assess whether alcohol availability operates as a marketing and assortative mixing mechanism or as a trigger is to consider other measurements of availability that might better capture domains of alcohol availability.…”