Bad habits could thwart plans for slimming

Anyone who finds themselves regularly eating a cake in front of the telly at night might want to stop, as research has suggested bad habits could be thwarting slimming plans.

A study at the University of Southern California gave a group of cinemagoers either fresh popcorn or a bucket of stale.

People who did not usually have the treat ate a little of the fresh and hardly any of the stale, but those who always ate popcorn at the cinema ate as much of the out of date product as they did the fresh.

David Neal, the lead author, explained that it does not matter if food tastes good or not once we have attached a habit to it.

"When we've repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and make us keep eating," he commented.

In related news, a recent study from the Harbin Medical University in China discovered that people could consume fewer calories at mealtimes if they chewed each mouthful of food more.

Do you sometimes find yourself eating just for the sake of it?