Can hearing yourself eat reduce appetite?

You know by now that eating on the run is not good for you. When you are distracted you are prone to eat more than you really want to because you miss the signals that you have eaten enough. So you probably do sit down to eat, and you probably take yourself away from a screen because you know that your device, computer, or the television is another form of distraction. Yet despite doing all these good things if you are listening to music or your favourite podcast while you eat, it could be that you still have a problem.

It seems that the loud noises are a problem because they are masking the sound of your own chewing. If you take away that one of your senses then it influences your sense of how much you have eaten.

This was revealed in a new study that had subjects wear headphones while they ate snacks. The headphones played either loud or quiet noise. They found that loud noise resulted in subjects eating more than when they listened to quiet noise. Specifically they found that subjects listening to loud noise ate an average of four pretzels compared to an average 2.75 pretzels consumed by those listening to quieter noise.

The researchers believe that this happened because sound is, an often overlooked, sensory cue in determining when you realise that you have eaten enough. The important point here is that it is not the sound a food cooking or of a sizzling plate of Mongolian tofu, or even the crack of piercing your crème brûlée that we are talking about. It seems that the loud noises are a problem because they are masking the sound of your own chewing. If you take away that one of your senses then it influences your sense of how much you have eaten. The crunch of your celery or your pretzel is part of the signalling that nudges, or perhaps shames, you to realise that you have eaten enough.

Eating one pretzel more may not seem like much but that is 33 per cent more and if you eat one more metaphorical pretzel on enough occasions then that does become an issue.

Removing extraneous noise from your space is just another aspect of making eating a mindful exercise.