Snacking while watching TV impairs food recall and promotes food intake on a later TV free test meal

Abstract

Eating while viewing TV may impair memory of food intake and promote over-consumption on a later meal. In Experiment 1, females ate a similar amount of snack-food either with or without TV. Later, participants who had snacked with TV ate more food on a TV-free lunch and were less accurate in recalling their earlier snack-food intake. Experiment 2 explored whether the nature of the TV content might alter these effects. Using a similar design, females watched boring, sad or funny TV, or no-TV at all. Relative to the no-TV control, all TV while snacking conditions ate a similarly greater amount on the later TV-free test lunch. Recall accuracy for the snack phase was also similarly poorer in all TV conditions. These findings suggest that eating with TV per se impacts on later food intake, and a mnemonic-based explanation seems to be the best account for these findings.

Manipulations of attention during eating and their effects on later snack intake

“…Distraction during eating increased later snack intake while focusing on food decreased later snack intake. These effects were large and are consistent with previous reports (Brunstrom et al, 2011;Higgs & Donohoe, 2011;Higgs & Woodward, 2009;Mittal et al, 2011;Robinson et al, 2014). Distraction during eating impaired later meal memory whether it was assessed by serial recall of the order in which foods were eaten or a measure of meal memory vividness.…”

“…First, the samples tested are very homogenous and consist predominantly of young women of normal BMI. This is also true of other similar studies (Brunstrom et al, 2011;Higgs & Donohoe, 2011;Higgs & Woodward, 2009;Mittal et al, 2011), although one study has explored the effects of focused attention during eating in overweight women and found similar effects (Robinson et al, 2014). Given the proposed underlying cognitive mechanisms, it seems unlikely that different effects would be observed in a more representative sample, but this should be confirmed in future studies.…”

“…These data suggest that the content of a distracting TV programme may influence meal memory encoding. Mittal et al (2011) did not find differential effects of watching a boring, sad or funny TV programme on later intake. It may be that the mood inducing effects of TV do not affect later intake, but other content related factors, such as the presence or absence of food, are influential.…”

“…If attention is drawn away from eating by providing participants with the opportunity to watch television or play a computer game while eating, these distracted participants will eat more later than participants who were not distracted during eating (Oldham-Cooper, Hardman, Nicoll, Rogers, & Brunstrom, 2011;Higgs & Woodward, 2009;Mittal, Stevenson, Oaten, & Miller, 2011). Conversely, if participants are encouraged to focus on food while they are eating then they will eat less than participants who were asked to eat as usual (Higgs & Donohoe, 2011;Robinson, Kersbergen, & Higgs, 2014).…”

“…We restricted our sample to women only because males tend to take advantage of the opportunity to eat as much as possible in these kinds of studies and it is hard to recruit enough men from a predominantly female cohort of students (Mittal et al, 2011). Eating habits were assessed by the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ; Van Strien, Frijters, Bergers, & Defares, 1986).…”