Hooked: How Processed Food Became Addictive

by Michael Moss

But her work offered the companies some insight into how they can overcome our free will to control our eating habits.21 Low price, convenience, and variety get a boost when another aspect of our biology gets exploited: our memory. In one experiment, she gave her subjects lunch, and some of them got to watch TV while they ate. That distraction had an immediate effect on their eating habits, she reported. It was as if the TV wiped out some of their memory of the lunch. They ended up feeling hungrier sooner than they would have without the distraction. The people who watched TV during lunch ate more cookies as an afternoon snack.22 Three years later, in 2017, we had some real-life numbers on the power of distraction.23 A survey by Ohio State University found that a third of Ohioans regularly watched TV during family meals, and those who did were far more likely to be obese. We eat what we remember, but as the food companies know, we eat more when we can be made to forget.