Eating your dinner in front of the TV is a common practice.
It can be way more entertaining and joyful, truth be told.
Especially when you are eating a whole food plant-based diet.
That big bowl of oatmeal, it takes a lot of time to chew…
Is it truly so, though?
Ruining an experience
We humans really like our food.
When we are together, we always seem to gather around the table, in good and bad times alike.
Food, it seems to play a central role in our social and personal lives.
We talk about it a lot, we make a special effort to prepare it well or we pay somebody else to do so for us.
We want our food tasty, good looking and fresh.
Why then, if we seem to enjoy and praise food so much, do we watch TV while mindlessly shoveling in our dinner without tasting it properly?
Can we really appreciate the taste of food while watching a movie? Can we truly appreciate the movie while we are preparing and tasting our next bite?
If you try to do both, you will see it truly ruins the experience.
Disturbing digestion
So, your mind is somewhere else, following the movie or the news. In that distant land you are not eating but fighting the bad guys or arguing with that politician.
You are not engaged with the eating. Your consciousness is not preparing you for the next bite.
Are you salivating the way you would be if eating was the only thing to do?
Saliva matters too. It starts breaking down starch before the food even reaches your stomach.
Are you chewing every bite, or are you swallowing pieces of food whole because you are somewhere else?
Food that isn’t chewed well isn’t fully digested. When people chewed almonds only 10 times instead of 40, more of the fat came out the other end, unused.
Were you really hungry in the first place?
When you are truly hungry, would you want some distraction while you are eating?
Wouldn’t the experience of savoring and enjoying the food be enough?
Probably.
In many cases, we are not hungry when we eat in front of the TV.
And, well, we shouldn’t eat when not hungry.
The best evidence isn’t about digestion at all. When researchers pooled 24 experiments, people who ate while distracted ate more at that meal, and even more at their next one, probably because they remembered less of what they had eaten. In one study, young women who watched TV during lunch ate more cookies that same afternoon than when they had eaten the identical lunch without it.
Give it a try
Try eating your main dishes without a TV, computer or a phone to distract you.
Do it for a while and then put on a movie while eating.
We think you’ll find it surprisingly hard to enjoy.
Read next
- Hunger on a plant based diet: why the signal changes, and what to do while it settles.
- Why am I so hungry at night: evenings specifically, which is where the television usually is.
- How to feel satiated with whole plant foods: how fullness actually works, measured rather than guessed.
