Reading negative news will make you fat and eat more high-calorie snacks

Past studies have shown that people who frequently use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are more likely to eat junk food and snacks. Even if you are watching TV news, you should be careful! According to a report in the journal Psychological Science, seeing bad news on the news can also make people eat more high-calorie snacks, making them more likely to gain weight.

Reading too much negative news or bad news can also make people want to eat more calories.

A study by the University of Miami had subjects look at two types of posters with completely different themes: one set was more general, neutral information-conveying posters, and the other set was posters depicting struggles during economic hardship. While the subjects were watching, two bowls of snacks with the same calorie content were placed in front of them; but the subjects were deliberately told that one of them was very high in calories and the other was very low in calories.

The results showed that the subjects who watched the tragic scene series of posters not only ate 40% more snacks than the other group, but also ate 70% more high-calorie snacks than low-calorie snacks. The subjects who watched the neutral message posters ate similar proportions of high-calorie and low-calorie snacks.

Juliano Laran, the main researcher of the study from the School of Business Administration, said that it is not difficult to find from the research results that when people's mood is affected by negative news, they tend to eat more high-calorie foods to soothe their mood. The taste of the food is not the main reason, but people's psychological desire for calories. Therefore, when eating, if you watch TV news and receive a lot of negative news, you will eat 40% more calories than those who do not watch negative news.