Calories: Eating while watching TV might be relaxing but researchers claim it can cause hunger later on when the body 'forgets' that it's full
Eating your evening meal while watching your favourite TV show may be a good way to relax, but it could make you more likely to indulge in late-night snacks, research suggests.
A study of young women found that those who ate while watching television packed away more calories later in the day.
It is thought that being able to remember what we have eaten is key to feeling full.
And if distractions stop us from forming those memories, we eat more later on.
The Australian researchers looked at the effect of TV viewing on a group of young women of normal weight.
They were given 20 minutes to consume as much chocolate, crisps and cola as they wanted. Half ate the junk food while watching TV, the others sat quietly as they ate their fill.
Later on, both groups were sat down to eat sandwiches, biscuits, crackers and dip.
Those who had watched TV earlier packed away 50 per cent more calories than the other women, the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology reports.
When the women were then asked how much they had eaten at the start of the experiment, those who had not been watching TV were better at remembering.
This, say the researchers, could help explain the results, with an accurate memory of what we have eaten crucial to feeling full.
The study team from Macquarie University in Sydney said: ‘It may be that TV makes it harder to attend to interceptive signals, harder to attend to how much is being eaten, harder to consolidate memories of food intake and harder to recall them during a meal.’
They suspect that men are similarly affected but have yet to prove this, because when they tried the experiment on a group of males, they appeared to see it as an opportunity to eat as much as possible without paying.
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