Distracted dining dangerous for health

Distracted dining may be as dangerous to your health as distracted driving is to your safety on the highway, reveals a new study.

“Being distracted during meals puts kids at added risk for obesity and increased consumption of unhealthy foods,” said Barbara H Fiese, director of Family Resiliency Centre (FRC) at the University of Illinois, US. “We found that noisy and distracting environments affected parents’ actions, and we know that parents set the tone for the quality of family mealtimes,” Fiese added. To test the effects of mealtime distraction, researchers videotaped 60 families during the meal-time. Half the families were subjected to the sounds of a loud vacuum cleaner in an adjacent room for 15 minutes while they were eating. The other half experienced no distraction.

The effects of the distraction were more marked for parents than for children. The study shows that it’s not enough to encourage families to eat together regularly without identifying other factors that promote health. The article appeared in the journal Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice.