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Distracted eating is common and has adverse health consequences.
The Washington Post
By Richard Sima
January 11, 2025 | 648 words | ★★★☆☆
When was the last time you ate and only focused on eating?
Many of us eat while working, fiddling with our smartphones or on the go.
Distracted eating, as it is termed in scientific literature, coincides with greater flexibility in where we can eat our food and the accessibility of distractions.
As a result, “you get this weird blend of different activities. They’re no longer fixed to certain places and times,” said Lotte van Dillen, a professor of social psychology at Leiden University. “You can do everything anywhere at any moment. That’s not good.”
When van Dillen and her colleagues conducted studies of large, representative samples of people in the Netherlands, they found a “surprisingly consistent” result: Roughly 70 to 75 percent of the time, people are distracted and doing something else when they eat.
Distracted eating could have adverse health consequences. Studies show that when we are distracted, we tend to eat more. And when we are done eating, we are more likely to eat again sooner. In turn, regular distracted eating is associated with weight gain.
At the same time, distractions prevent us from fully tasting or enjoying what we are noshing on by disrupting signals in our brain.
Despite eating more, “it’s kind of tragic that you’re not enjoying it so much,” van Dillen said.
Distracted eating causes us to eat more and taste less
When we eat, our guts release satiety hormones such as leptin, ghrelin and GLP-1 that signal to our brains that we are getting full, a process which takes about 20 minutes. But being distracted makes it harder to experience these satiety signals.
Distractions add cognitive load to our brain that competes with and reduces our ability to sense not only the amount of food and how full we are getting, but also its taste.
In an early experiment from a 2013 study, van Dillen and her colleagues had 42 participants sweeten their own lemonade with grenadine to taste. Some were distracted by an easy cognitive task (memorizing a one-digit number), while others had a harder one (memorizing a seven-digit number). Those challenged with the harder mental task added a whopping 50 percent more of the sugary syrup but did not report their drink as sweeter than participants doing the easier mental task.
Distractions change how the brain processes taste.
In a follow-up 2023 study published in the journal Appetite, van Dillen and her colleagues put 46 participants in an fMRI brain scanner and fed them sugar water of different sweetness levels through a bundle of tubes. When participants had a more challenging cognitive task, they rated the strong sugar solution as less sweet than when the task was easy.
The distracted brain had less activity in the insula, a region important for taste processing, and the prefrontal cortex, which is important for higher-level cognitive processes. There was also a disruption in connectivity between the insula, prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens, a key area for reward processing. A distraction-related reduction in insula activity predicted how much more people ate afterward, a 2020 study reported.
Researchers have found that distractions blunt our other tastes as well, including for high-fat, bitter, sour, salty and umami flavors.
Our ability to smell food odors — an important facet of taste — is also dulled; a 2021 study found that playing difficult Tetris levels caused people to rate food smells as less intense.
In short, distractions have a “sledgehammer effect” on our senses, van Dillen said.
Not fully experiencing the food means we do not fully enjoy it either.
In a 2024 study, van Dillen and her colleagues found evidence that distractions cause otherwise enjoyable activities such as eating a snack, reading a novel or watching TV, to feel less enjoyable than we expected.
Feeling underwhelmed, we are more likely to overconsume to make up for this shortfall in enjoyment, engaging in what researchers dub “hedonic compensation.” ■
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