Do you eat when you’re bored? So do I. Then again, I eat when I’m not bored, too. So the real question is: do we all eat more when we’re bored than, say, when we’re highly entertained?
The answer, according to a clever study by Aner Tal and colleagues, is no. In fact, sometimes being energized by your environment may be the worst thing for your waistline.
In the study, Tal sat college students down in front of the TV with an array of tasty treats at their disposal – M&M’s, cookies, carrots and grapes. Tal then measured how many calories students consumed on average during 20 minutes of TV viewing where the students had no idea that their food consumption was being monitored.
When watching 20 minutes of the Charlie Rose Show, a PBS talk show (yawn!), students consumed a bit more than 100 calories of snacks, on average. But other students, picked at random to watch an excerpt from an action movie, The Island, ate twice that amount in the same period of time.
Double your fun and double your calories? (To read the rest of this post and leave comments, please visit Forbes.)
