Eating while standing or sitting, could posture affect satiety?

"Appetite" recently published the latest publication from the University of Surrey in the UK. The research team said that even if the calories of the meal are the same, the feeling of fullness brought by eating food while standing may still not be comparable to the feeling of fullness when eating at a table.

In the study, the authors recruited 80 female subjects for the experiment. The authors divided the subjects into groups and gave each subject a portion of pasta: one group of subjects was told that the pasta served in a cup box with a plastic spoon was a snack and must be eaten standing up; the other group was told that this was a meal, and the pasta was served in a ceramic plate with metal cutlery on the table, and the subjects could sit down and eat.

After the subjects finished their pasta, they were taken to a second room filled with unhealthy snacks. The subjects were told that this was a taste test, but in reality the authors recorded the amount of snacks the subjects consumed in the second room. The results showed that the group that ate pasta while standing consumed 50 percent more calories in the taste test than the group that sat down to eat pasta.

The authors suggest that people may mentally check off their daily meals as complete, and therefore be less likely to return to their meals hours later when eating occurs at the table. However, if eating occurs while standing and is considered a snack, people will not feel that they have completed their progress and will feel that they need to eat more food later.

The study was published in Appetite, volume 120, pages 666-672

This article is from ELSEVIER Global Pharmaceutical News