In Hard Times, an Instinct to Pack on Pounds
January 25, 2013
The Wall Street Journal:
When times are tough, people make like bears getting ready to hibernate: they eat more and prefer higher calorie foods.
That’s the implication of a new paper reporting that, in an experiment involving M&Ms, people faced with messages about hard times ate way more than people surrounded by neutral messages. The paper actually describes three experiments exploring how humans adjust their eating when unconsciously “primed” with words such as adversity, struggle and survival. Researchers found that the perception of hard times prompts people to live more for the moment, let tomorrow take care of itself, and stoke up against an uncertain future.
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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