Tasteless food habits
We are creatures of habit aren’t we? We slip on the same old comfy clothes, watch the same type of shows, read the same type of books, and eat the same type of food in the same places. If that’s depressing your rebellious self-image then a new study might add even more to your malaise. It seems that habits regarding food are so ingrained that you might happily eat stale food if the time and place is right.
In the new study researchers gave people about to enter a movie theatre a bucket of popcorn that was either freshly popped or a week old and stale.
People who did not usually eat popcorn at the movies ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn. So for these people, for whom popcorn at the movies was not an established habit, their eating pattern was dictated by the taste of the food. However, people who always ate popcorn when they went to the movies ate about the same amount of popcorn whether it was fresh or stale.
The researchers say that when you have repeatedly eaten a particular food in a certain environment your brain comes to associate that food with that environment and will keep you eating as long as the environmental cues are present, in this case, as long as the lights are low and the movie is on.
Rationally, nobody would choose to eat spongy, flaccid, week old, stale popcorn but this experiment shows that food decisions are not always rational and not even based on taste. Once formed, eating habits are adhered to regardless of taste and value of the food.
The researchers went a step further and offered stale popcorn or fresh popcorn in a meeting room in an office. Outside of the movie theatre environment taste mattered a lot. Even people who habitually ate popcorn at the movies ate significantly less stale popcorn when they were in the office situation.
Having established that environment is critical to food decisions, the researchers then created a simple disruption in a familiar environment. As people entered a movie theatre, again using stale or fresh popcorn, the people were asked to eat the popcorn with either their dominant or non-dominant hand. Using the non-dominant hand broke the habit and even regular popcorn eaters ate much less stale popcorn when using their non-dominant hand.
It seems that using a different hand disrupted the habit and made people a lot more aware of what they were eating. You may not be able to alter your normal food environment if you want to change your food habits but you can disrupt your routine: use a different hand to stir that coffee, face a different direction, or switch off the radio/television/computer. Break your habits and you’ll make better decisions.
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