Immersive videos of someone eating candy reduces cravings: study

Scientists have found some Twix to minimize the itch to eat candy.

A study published in the journal Scientific Reports showed that people who watched immersive videos of other people eating candy had a significant decline in craving it.

The research was inspired by the trend of mukbang videos — live streams in which the viewers watch the host eat for entertainment — which originated in South Korea.

“We were intrigued by the mukbang phenomenon where people seem to enjoy watching others eat large amounts of food, with some reporting feeling full afterward. We were motivated to find out if there was a way that we can explore this through a series of studies and determine if watching food consumption videos can have effects on their actual eating behavior,” co-author of the study Lee Hui Min, a master’s student from NTU’s WKWSCI, said in a media release.

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (NTU Singapore) wanted to determine if watching immersive videos, such as mukbang, would elicit strong cravings or unhealthy eating habits, such as binge eating.

However, results revealed that these videos actually had the opposite effect.

Previous studies have discovered a link between watching immersive videos and achieving a decreased appetite but never analyzed repeated exposure to such videos.

Researchers looked at 317 Singapore residents between the ages of 21 and 28, with the demographics of the group representing Singapore’s multi-racial society.

One group of participants would watch an immersive video of people eating M&Ms, repeated 30 times for a total of 8 minutes of viewing, while the control group watched a video of a single coin being put into a laundry machine 30 times.

Immersive videos transport the viewer into the video itself using innovative technologies such as virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) headsets, 360-degree videos and motion tracking, to allow the person to like an active participant rather than an onlooker.

After watching, the researchers would offer M&Ms to look at how repeated exposure to these videos affected a person’s cravings for candy.

They found that those who watched the candy-eating video had about one-third candy (32% to 38% less candy) on average — about three pieces less — compared to the control group, suggesting that repeated exposure to the eating videos makes the person believe that they themselves have consumed the candy, reducing the hunger for it.

NTU researchers clarify that the reduced cravings were due to habituation — an effect that reduces a physiological and behavioral response as a result of repeated exposure and stimulation.

“Mukbang videos might be satisfying cravings and potentially causing people to consume less food. It appears that seeing so much food being consumed has the possibility of inducing habituation among viewers leading to some kind of satiation,” Benjamin Li Junting, assistant professor at NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication (WKWSCI) and leader of the study, said.

Habituated people were less inclined to respond to food cues, leading to a lower desire to actually eat the food.

“Our findings suggest that viewing food-related immersive videos may be a way to induce satiation and reduce the amount of food consumed after watching. This could be helpful for individuals looking to curb their appetites or manage compulsive eating behaviors,” Li explained.

He continued, “For example, clinicians might tap into habituation as a psychological mechanism in therapy interventions for patients. This can possibly appear in the form of repeated viewings of other people eating food, leading to reduced desire to eat or induce feelings of satiation or fullness.”

The authors added that the results could help provide an understanding of how mukbang videos affect eating habits that could advise on strategies for interventions or guidelines for how to portray healthier eating behaviors in the context of media.

Researchers also tested adding exposure smell to the study to discover how visual, auditory and olfactory stimuli combined can affect a person’s eating patterns and cravings.

Since scent can play a large role in the perception of food, it can help determine if the added exposure would impact food-related responses.

Scientists repeated the original experiment but added the diffused scent of chocolate while participants watched the same videos 30 times.

Results showed that participants actually consumed 11% fewer M&Ms — or one less piece of candy — than they did when watching the video without the scent. Adding the cue of smell showed that participants ate an average of four pieces less candy overall compared to the control group.

“Smelling chocolate had a similar, habituating, effect as watching people consuming chocolate and decreased the participants’ desire for the candy,” Li said.

“Our study found that exposure to food scent cues alongside visual food cues can lead to a sensory stimulation of tasting the food. Some researchers have termed this embodied cognition,” he added. “This makes sense as the experience of food consumption typically involves more than one sense, and the addition of a food scent appears to enhance the effect of one feeling satiated, or full.”

However, the NTU team of researchers shared that they will be conducting further research in order to see the longterm effects of both visual and olfactory exposure on a person’s craving for a food item.

“As we only tested a chocolate scent in our study, we are keen to explore if the results might be different for other types of smells, for example, savory scents like garlic, or scents of greasy foods like French fries,” co-author Lee explained. “There is also the question of whether the length of scent exposure will have a stronger influence, and whether the results of habituation through watching 360-degree videos persist over time.”

Assistant professor Li added, “In future studies, we hope to test the long-term effects of repeatedly watching such immersive videos. We hypothesize that it would have a long-lasting effect on eating behaviors, as the visual and olfactory stimuli could be learned by participants, such as in the well-known physiology experiment Pavlov’s Bell, conducted by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, where subjects learned a behavior or bodily reaction after being repeatedly conditioned to stimuli, such as an audible or visual cue.”