NEW YORK - Watching television disrupts children's' normal response to food -- they will eat more while they're sitting in front of the tube, whether or not they're really hungry.
"These data, combined with those from other studies, support recommendations to reduce television watching and restrict eating while watching television as part of a healthy lifestyle," Dr. Jennifer L. Temple and colleagues from the University at Buffalo, New York, conclude.
Temple and her team looked at how television affected "habituation to food cues." Habituation is the phenomenon that occurs when a person repeatedly provided with a food will eventually lose interest and stop eating it once they are full. Providing a new, unfamiliar food can disrupt this process, and a person will start eating again even if they're not hungry. Non-food stimuli may also disrupt habituation if a person's attention is distracted.
In the first experiment, the researchers had 30 normal-weight kids ranging in age from 9 to 12 perform a computer task to earn points to eat food. The task consisted of 10 two-minute time blocks. For the first 7 blocks, kids worked for points to eat half a junior cheeseburger. For the final 3, some children continued to work for pieces of cheeseburger, others worked for French fries, and the third group worked for cheeseburgers while watching television.
Full Story: REUTERS
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