Eating attentively: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of food intake memory and awareness on eating
Robinson and colleagues reviewed twenty-four experiments on whether attention and memory affect how much people eat, and combined the results. Four conclusions come out of it. Eating while distracted moderately increased how much was eaten at the time, and increased later eating to a greater degree still, which is the more interesting half, since it implies the cost of a distracted meal is paid afterwards rather than during. Strengthening a person's memory of what they had eaten reduced later intake. Removing visual information about how much had been consumed during a meal increased intake at the time. And simply making people more aware of the food as they ate it, without affecting memory, had no detectable effect. Taken together the evidence points at memory rather than attention as the operative mechanism. The authors propose attentive eating as a route to managing intake without counting calories. Note that a later replication attempt found no effect of focused attention, and this vault cites both.
Robinson and colleagues reviewed twenty-four experiments on whether attention and memory affect how much people eat, and combined the results. Four conclusions come out of it. Eating while distracted moderately increased how much was eaten at the time, and increased later eating to a greater degree still, which is the more interesting half, since it implies the cost of a distracted meal is paid afterwards rather than during. Strengthening a person's memory of what they had eaten reduced later intake. Removing visual information about how much had been consumed during a meal increased intake at the time. And simply making people more aware of the food as they ate it, without affecting memory, had no detectable effect. Taken together the evidence points at memory rather than attention as the operative mechanism. The authors propose attentive eating as a route to managing intake without counting calories. Note that a later replication attempt found no effect of focused attention, and this vault cites both.
Written from the abstract, Europe PMC.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Pooled standardised difference 0.40, 95% CI 0.12 to 0.68.
Where we use it
- Why You Are Hungry an Hour After a Big Lunch, Why We Crave
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.112.045245
DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.112.045245