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Mindfulness is a meditation technique that teaches you how to pay more attention to the world around you and your own thoughts and feelings. There’s evidence it can be good for your mental health. But can it also be used to help you eat less?

Studies suggest that eating ‘mindlessly’ – for instance, eating at your desk while you continue working, or eating distractedly in front of the television – can lead to us ultimately eating more. Now researchers are also investigating whether the opposite might be true: whether eating mindfully – thinking about food as we eat it, paying attention to the sensations involved in each bite – might lead us to eat less.

Professor Katy Tapper of City, University of London, is researching this area. She and her team helped design an experiment for Trust Me I’m a Doctor in which sixty volunteers were split into two groups. They were not told the true purpose of the experiment, and were informed that they were taking part in a taste perception task, to avoid awareness that we were monitoring their food intake, which might lead participants to modify their behaviour.

Each group was given an identical lunch. The first group were asked to eat as they usually do. But the second group were given instructions in how to eat mindfully. When this group ate their food they were asked to pay attention to the colour, smell, taste and texture of the food, as well as the sound it made when they chewed.

Then, all the volunteers were offered a plate of biscuits and asked to eat as much as they wanted; and were instructed to keep food diaries so we could record how much they ate later at home.

We wanted to find out whether the group who had been asked to eat mindfully would actually eat less. However, the figures surprised us.

Our study found no significant differences in the amount eaten at lunch, the amount of biscuits eaten after lunch, or the amount eaten at home. Eating mindfully did not make a significant impact on the amount of food our volunteers consumed. Prof Tapper suggested why this might be the case: “One of the things that people do report about mindful eating is that they get more pleasure from the food if they eat in that way, so it could mean that people could eat more frequently.”

But several of our participants did report they thought that mindfulness led them to healthier choices, including an increased enjoyment of fruit over chocolate biscuits.

So although our study was inconclusive in whether eating mindfully can lead you to eating less, it does hint at benefits associated with taking time to appreciate our food which are echoed in other studies. There is some evidence that, if you are already trying to lose weight, eating mindfully can help you eat less.

One aspect of an experiment like this is that it involves participants taking part without being aware of what is actually being measured – sometimes even, as in this case, being led to believe that something different is being tested. One of our participants, Anette, raised concerns about this approach. It involves a measure of deception which she feels left her participating under false premises. “This experiment violates the basic principle of informed consent”, Anette says. “If I had been given full information about the experiment I was volunteering to take part in, I would have had the chance to say no. In this case, I would not have participated. But this choice was taken away from me. I am very upset that I did not have informed consent. Psychology has a bad track record with deceiving participants, to the point where many famous experiments of the past would now not be possible because of ethical concerns. I trusted the 91Èȱ¬ and the University, and so it did not even occur to me that they might mislead me. I don’t feel that this experiment is so vital that it validates an ethical exception.”

Dr Tapper explained that it can be difficult for scientists to get accurate measures of food intake because, when people know this is being measured, they tend to eat less. This is one reason why scientists sometimes obscure the real aims of their research whilst people are taking part. However, this does introduce risks, for example – as in this instance – that someone will feel unhappy about having been misled. Before any research can take place, an ethics committee considers these risks and balances them against the potential benefits of the research, to decide whether the level of risk is acceptable and also to ensure measures are in place to minimise the risks. The ethics committee adheres to British Psychological Society guidelines on research ethics.

In this particular experiment for Trust Me, the ethics process did not prevent the situation where one of our participants was unhappy about the study procedures; and we are grateful to Anette for raising this important issue, which has been fed back to the University and will inform any future experiments we conduct for the programme.

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