Eating a snack on the go does not fill you up as much as sitting down to a meal at a table, researchers have found.
Even
when the calories are exactly the same, if people think of their food
as a ‘snack’ they will eat 50 per cent more later on than if they think
of it as a ‘meal’experts at the University of Surrey believe people mentally ‘tick off’ their three meals a day.
So when they sit down to eat one of those meals they do not need to eat again for a few hours.
But if they grab a snack and eat it standing up, they do not tick it off, and feel as though they still need to eat again.Study
leader Professor Jane Ogden, a health psychologist at Surrey, believes
the food industry is fueling the obesity crisis by marketing food as
‘snacks’ to take advantage of Britain’s on-the-go culture.Her research team, whose work is published in the Appetite medical journal, tested their theory on 80 women.The participants were each given a pot of Tesco pasta to eat - they could choose either cheese and tomato or tuna and sweetcorn.They
were then either told it was a ‘snack’ or a ‘meal’ - and were either
given the food in a plastic pot and told to eat it standing up with a
plastic spoon, or were served it on a ceramic plate at a table with
metal cutlery.
When they had finished
the food, each participant was led into a second room to take part in a
‘taste test’ of various unhealthy foods - chocolate biscuits, hula
hoops, M&Ms and mini cheddar's.
The
scientists found those who had eaten a ‘snack’ standing up went on to
eat far more in the subsequent ‘taste test’ than those who had had a
‘meal’ sat at a table - even though they had initially consumed the same
calories.
The ‘snackers’ later ate 50
per cent more total calories - and 100 per cent more chocolate M&Ms -
than those who had eaten the pasta sitting down at a table.
Professor
Ogden said: ‘It is to do with registering that you have eating. Knowing
that you have eaten is a psychological process - you tick off the fact
you have had a meal.
‘If you just have a snack you do not register it in the same way.’She
added: ‘With our lives getting busier increasing numbers of people are
eating on the go and consuming foods that are labelled as “snacks” to
sustain them.
‘The food industry is
aware we are eating more on the go and they are labeling food as sacks -
it is exacerbating the problem of weight gain.’She
added: ‘We should call our food a meal and eat it as meal, helping make
us more aware of what we are eating so that we don’t overeat later on.’Experts are increasingly worried about Britain’s obesity crisis.Some 67 per cent of adult men and 57 per cent of adult women in Britain are overweight - well above the global average.
Of
these, 24 per cent of British adults - 12 million people – are
considered obese, a vast increase since 1980, when only 16 per cent were
in this category.Growing evidence
suggests the demise of the family meal eaten at a dinner table, and the
boom in sandwich chains and fast food restaurants, means we are
increasingly snacking on the go.A
report by the Royal Society of Public Health published last year found
British adults add an average 767 calories to their diet every week
simply by snacking on the journey to and from work.Much
of this intake was due to people grabbing croissants and other snacks
on their commute because they had missed breakfast, the report said.
Another report by the Government’s Behavioral Insights Team, also published last year, came to similar conclusions.It
said: ‘We are now more obese and more likely to say that we are trying
to lose weight, both of which drive misreporting. We snack and eat
outside the home more, making consumption harder to track.’(Daily Mail)
