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 “Mindful eating practices encourage people to slow down and think
about their eating experience,” said lead author Brian P. Meier of
Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. “My guess is that most people do
not do that routinely.”
Meier and colleagues studied a group of mostly white college
students who ate either five pieces of Blommers Appalachian Gold
Milk Chocolate Discs or five Carr's Plain Table Water crackers, each
about a 75 calorie portion.
The students were randomly divided into four groups. One group was
given some chocolate and instructed to eat it mindfully, another
group was assigned to do the same, but with the crackers instead of
the chocolate, a third group was told just to eat chocolate (without
instructions about mindfulness), and the fourth group was assigned
to nonmindful cracker consumption.
They ate while listening to 4.5 minute audio recordings, either
including instructions on eating mindfully, or without specific
instructions.
The mindfulness recording included instructions like “hold a
chocolate/ cracker in your hand and gaze at the color and appearance
and to think about the farmers who produced the ingredients needed
to create the food,” and “focus on the sensations created by the
food.”
The students also completed mood questionnaires before and after
food consumption.
Those in mindful chocolate or cracker groups had more positive mood
after eating than they had before eating, and people who ate
chocolate had more improvement in mood than those who ate crackers.
“We only used milk chocolate and one amount (75 calories) in our
study,” Meier told Reuters Health by email. “We do not know if
mindfully eating dark chocolate or a higher amount of milk chocolate
changes the effect. Dark chocolate has more of the beneficial
ingredients for physical health according to several studies, but we
did not examine it here in terms of mood.”
People who liked the food they were eating seemed to get more of a
mood boost, so liking the food may explain at least part of the
connection, the authors write in the journal Appetite.
Specific components of chocolate as well as associations with past
positive experiences may influence mood, Meier said.
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The study doesn’t necessarily endorse chocolate intake, said Carlene
Wilson of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who was not
part of the new study.
“The mood benefits are likely to be short term and impacted by
amount consumed so that consumption of larger amounts would lead to
excessive energy intake and associated guilt,” Wilson told Reuters
Health by email. "Excess energy intake is linked to the occurrence
of obesity, which is a risk factor for virtually all chronic
diseases.”
“The study by Meier et al. does not suggest that people should eat
more chocolate, per say, but that if they tend to enjoy chocolate
normally, establishing mindfulness will increase the pleasure of
eating it,” said Robert J. Goodman of Northern Arizona University in
Flagstaff, who was also not part of the new study.
Mindfulness promotes healthier consumption habits by maximizing the
enjoyment people receive from their food, Goodman told Reuters
Health by email.
“I’m sure most health experts would suggest to eat candy in
moderation and aim for a balanced diet,” Meier said. “Our data
suggest that people should slow down and savor their Halloween candy
because it might allow them to be a bit happier afterwards although
we recognize that it may be hard to get children to do so.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2e4NM7y Appetite, online September 15, 2016.
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