Behavior: Distracted Eating Adds More to Waistlines

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: January 3, 2011

Catching up with e-mail while you eat lunch? Watching television? You may end the day eating more than you think.

ColumnsResearchers had 22 volunteers eat a meal while playing computer solitaire and 22 others eat the same meal in the same amount of time while undistracted. They told the subjects it was a test of the effect of food on memory, but actually they were testing how full people felt after a meal, how much they ate at a “taste test” 30 minutes later, and how successfully they could recall exactly what they ate. Their results appear online in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Not only were distracted eaters worse at remembering what they had eaten, but they felt significantly less full just after lunch, even after the researchers controlled for height and weight. And at the taste-test session a half-hour later, they ate about twice as many cookies as those who had lunch without playing games.