Could Healthy Foods Be One of the Causes of Overeating?

What are the Causes of Overeating

What are the Causes of Overeating

Could Healthy Foods Be One of the Causes of Overeating?

New year’s resolution or not, many of us finish the holiday season and start a new year with an aim to eat more healthfully, but the results of a recent study have suggested that placing a tremendous focus on healthful foods may actually be among the causes of overeating. The idea is that if a food is portrayed as being good for you, you might be inclined to eat more of it, regardless of its calorie content.

These recent findings was published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Within them, researchers indicated that the foods that are most frequently deemed to be healthful are also among those that are less filling. As a result choosing these foods first can become one of the causes of overeating. After all, if they’re not filling us up, we tend to eat more of them.

The study was conducted by a team at the University of Texas-Austin. They looked into the relationship between healthful foods and the commonly held belief that they are less filling, making healthful eating one of the causes of overeating. To do this, the researchers looked at the behaviors of people during three experiments.

The first experiment was the Implicit Association Test, in which 50 undergraduate students were participants. They were asked to give their opinions on how filling a healthful food was in comparison to an unhealthful one.

The second test involved the participation of 40 graduate students who were asked to eat one of two cookies that were distributed at random. The first was presented within packaging that suggested that it was not healthful while the second came in packaging indicating that it was a healthful treat. The participants were asked to eat the cookie they were given and then rate their levels of hunger.

The third experiment was conducted in the “real world” and involved the participation of 72 undergraduate students. They were asked to report on the way the portrayal of healthful foods caused them to make decisions with regards to the amounts they were eating. They were asked to do this before watching a short film. Then they were asked to explain how the information they were given in the film impacted the amount of food they actually ate while they were watching the film.

The outcome was that the researchers found people see more healthful foods as less filling and, therefore, feel inclined to eat more in order to be satisfied by their meals. This could suggest that food labels claiming that a food is good for you could be contributing to the obesity epidemic.

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