Ever wondered why you reach for a snack after hitting the gym? Research shows that physical exercise often leads to increased food consumption, whether it is treating yourself for a job well done or replenishing the energy you have burned. With countless sports events airing and our screens constantly filled with sports competitions, a new question arises: Can watching sports on a screen also influence how much we eat? The answer is yes. Our research co-authored with Jannine Lasaleta reveals that watching sports videos can increase candy consumption.
But there is more to the story: The difficulty of the sports you are watching plays a crucial role in these effects. We first invited 112 students to the Grenoble Ecole de Management experimental lab to watch a video and test some candies. Half of the students watched a video with men and women playing sports , while the other half watched one without any physical activity .
We then gave each student a 70g cup of candy and asked them to judge its quality for three minutes. The students who saw the sports video ate more candy than those who saw the one without physical activity. Our initial test thus revealed that watching sports videos can boost candy consumption, but here's the twist: male students indulged in far more candy than female students, so maybe the results were triggered by males' consumption.
Plus, we were still unsure whether the type of sport watched affected the candy intake. To learn more, we invited just the fem.
