2.2 time more chocolate, to be precise

Well somebody actually has proved it: if you have chocolate on your desk, you eat more chocolate. Even worse, you eat more chocolate if the chocolate is in a clear container than if it was in an opaque container.

This basic but important study in consumer behavior was done by scientists at Cornell University and was published in the International Journal of Obesity. The two factors they studied were the visibility and proximity of the chocolate in relation to a desk chair. Their conclusions sum it up nicely:

People ate an average of 2.2 more candies each day when they were visible, and 1.8 candies more when they were proximately placed on their desk vs 2 m away.

More worrying though is that people underestimated how much chocolate they ate if it was close to them, and overestimated their consumption if it was far away. These observations are important when doing surveys of sugar and food consumption.

And now you know how to eat more chocolate, and what to do to eat less

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