Health, Wellness and Nutrition
Habit Makes Bad Food Too Easy To Swallow
S
tudy reveals why people eat out of habit — even when
they are eating stale food — and suggests a way to
combat mindless eating.
Do you always get popcorn at the movies? Or snack while
you’re on the couch watching television? A new paper by
USC researchers reveals why bad eating habits persist even
when the food we’re eating doesn’t taste good. The study
also reveals the surprisingly simple ways we can counter
our habits to gain control over what we eat.
In an ingenious experiment, researchers gave people
about to enter a movie theater a bucket of either just-
popped, fresh popcorn or stale, week-old popcorn.
Moviegoers who didn’t usually eat popcorn at the movies
ate much less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn. The week-
old popcorn just didn’t taste as good.
But moviegoers who indicated that they typically had
popcorn at the movies ate about the same amount of pop-
corn whether it was fresh or stale. In other words, for those
in the habit of having popcorn at the movies, it made no dif-
ference whether the popcorn tasted good or not.
“When we’ve repeatedly eaten a particular food in a par-
ticular environment, our brain comes to associate the food
with that environment and make us keep eating as long as
those environmental cues are present,” said lead author
David Neal, who was a psychology professor at USC when
the research was conducted and now heads a social and con-
sumer research firm.
The study, in the current issue of the journal Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin, has important implications
for understanding overeating and the conditions that may
cause people to eat even when they are not hungry or do not
like the food.
“People believe their eating behavior is largely activated
by how food tastes. Nobody likes cold, spongy, week-old
popcorn,” said corresponding author Wendy Wood, Provost
Professor of Psychology and Business at USC. “But once
we’ve formed an eating habit, we no longer care whether
the food tastes good. We’ll eat exactly the same amount,
whether it’s fresh or stale.”
The researchers controlled for hunger and whether the
participants liked the popcorn they received. The
researchers also gave popcorn to a control group watching
movie clips in a meeting room, rather than in a movie the-
ater.
In the meeting room, a space not usually associated with
popcorn, it mattered a lot if the popcorn tasted good. Out-
side of the movie theater context, even habitual movie
popcorn eaters ate much less stale popcorn than fresh pop-
corn, demonstrating the extent to which environmental cues
can trigger automatic eating behavior.
“The results show just how powerful our environment can
be in triggering unhealthy behavior,” Neal said. “Some-
times willpower and good intentions are not enough, and
we need to trick our brains by controlling the environment
instead.”
In another movie theater experiment, the researchers test-
ed a simple disruption of automatic
eating habits. Once again using stale
and fresh popcorn, the researchers
asked
participants
about to enter a film
screening to eat popcorn
either with their
dominant
or
non-domi-
n a n t
hand.
Using the non-dominant hand seemed to disrupt eating
habits and cause people to pay attention to what they were
Once we’ve formed an eating
habit, we no longer care
whether the food tastes good
eating. When using the non-dominant hand, moviegoers ate
much less of the stale than the fresh popcorn, and this
worked even for those with strong eating habits.
“It’s not always feasible for dieters to avoid or alter the
environments in which they typically overeat,” Wood said.
“More feasible, perhaps, is for dieters top actively disrupt
the established patterns of how they eat through simple
techniques, such as switching the hand they use to eat.”
Neal et al., “The Pull of the Past: When Do Habits Per-
sist Despite Conflict With Motives?” Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin: 2011.
March 21, 2012
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