Television watching increases motivated responding for food and energy intake in children

Abstract

Background:Sedentary activities, such as watching television, may disrupt habituation to food cues, thereby increasing motivation to eat and energy intake. Objective: These experiments were designed to examine the effect of television watching on habituation of ingestive behavior in children. Design: In experiment 1, all children worked for access to cheeseburgers in trials 1-7 (habituating stimulus). In trials 8 -10, children in the control group continued to work for cheeseburgers without any dishabituating stimuli, whereas children in the other groups received either a novel food (French fries) or television as dishabituating stimuli. Responding for food and amount of food eaten were measured. In experiment 2, all children had access to 1000 kcal of a preferred snack food. One group watched a continuous television show, and the control groups either watched no television or watched a repeated segment of a television show, which controls for the television stimulus but requires reduced allocation of attention. Results: In experiment 1, both the novel food and the television watching groups reinstated responding for food (P ҃ 0.009) and increased the amount of energy earned (P ҃ 0.018) above the level of the control subjects. In experiment 2, the continuous television group spent more time eating (P 0.0001) and consumed more energy than the no television and the repeated segment groups (P ҃ 0.007). Conclusion: These experiments show that television watching can dishabituate eating or disrupt the development of habituation, which may provide a mechanism for increased energy intake associated with watching television.Am J Clin Nutr 2007;85:355-61.

Sedentary Behavior and Dietary Intake in Children, Adolescents, and Adults

“…15,16 Furthermore, TV may be a distraction resulting in a lack of awareness of actual food consumption or overlooking food cues, leading to overconsumption. 17 It is opportune, therefore, to review whether dietary intake is associated with sedentary behavior in young people and adults. This may assist researchers in better interpreting the diversity of findings concerning sedentary behavior and weight status.…”

Response to “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body”

“…Our observations are that children (and adults) become "hypnotized" by the television screen and diminish their spontaneous movement. Temple and colleagues suggest that screen exposure may result in the disruption of energy balance regulation whereby energy intake no longer matches the very low levels of energy expenditure associated with sedentary screen time (2). These observations along with those of Tremblay and ours, however, only reflect the short influence of screen time.…”

“…More importantly, this increase in spontaneous physical activity was manifested as a preference over educational technologies that might have been suspected as being of primary interest for students. This finding is of particular interest for our research team which concomitantly published a paper documenting the biological impact of computer-related activities (2).…”

“…Plasma glucose and insulin instability were defined as the sum of absolute changes between each blood sample (every 8 min) over the 45-min testing period. Data adapted from Chaput et al (2).…”

The genetics of childhood obesity and interaction with dietary macronutrients

“…A number of recent studies suggest that both sedentary behavior (viewing television, playing video games, doing cognitive work, and listening to music) and reduced overall physical activity along with shorter sleep duration promote the overconsumption of dietary macronutrients, particularly fats and refined carbohydrates (Stroebele and de Castro 2006;Graves et al 2007;Temple et al 2007;Chaput et al 2008;Westerlund et al 2009). The increased consumption of a high-fat diet, particularly a high-fat diet enriched with saturated fatty acids, has been found to be strongly associated with increased adiposity in overweight and obese children (Aeberli et al 2006(Aeberli et al , 2008.…”