Thoughts of Gloom = Diet Doom

What’s more depressing than watching the news on television? How about the fact that doing so makes you want to escape by stuffing your face with food?

That’s the latest news from the Journal of Consumer Research, which published the results of a joint study conducted between Arizona State University and Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The authors of the study give us something rather morbid to chew on: Watching death-related drama on television, witnessing tragic events on the news, or even contemplating our own demise, spurs the appetite and compels us to consume more food. As a chronic fan of CSI-type television shows, I find this revelation more gruesome than anything that can be seen on cable.

Still, the study must have been interesting for the participants, half of whom were asked to write an essay on how they feel about the fact that they’re going to die someday. The other half, or the control group, were charged with the jolly task of writing an essay on a painful medical procedure. Now, in my mind, I find the latter topic just as morose as the first, if not more so. But, it turns out that the group who gave serious thought to their eventual leave of this plane of existence, couldn’t wait to chow down on the cookies the researchers sneakily made available. Even when lacking cookies as bait, other study subjects checked off items on grocery lists as though they looked forward to shopping with abandon in the future—sort of a culinary ‘bucket list,’ if you will.

The researchers also drew the conclusion that those study subjects that suffered from low self-esteem were much more likely to cave in to cravings after pondering death. In particular, considering their own mortality seemed to trigger a need to escape from what the researchers coined as ‘heightened self-awareness’ by gravitating toward over consumption overall, whether it be in the form of eating more or simply overspending on food.

What have we learned from this study? Be happy. Don’t think about dying; live for the moment instead. Go ahead and set your remote for your favorite CSI show…just snap a lock on the fridge first. Simple.

Another interesting observation (and I think that’s all it can be called) that came out of this study was the effect of a little mirror trick on the part of the researchers. They observed that whenever a mirror was positioned in front of a study participant, that person had far less desire to consume anything. Hmm. I suppose that if I could see myself greedily gobbling up potato chips or some other crispy, comfort food, that I wouldn’t be able to stand to watch either.

I have to wonder, though…does the tendency to over-consume apply to avid readers of murder mysteries too? After all, reading a good murder mystery can be just as riveting and jarring as watching the same kind of events unfold on television, fiction or not. I guess we’ll have to wait for someone to come up with the idea (and funding) to put these readers through a study of their own.