According to a new study from Cardiff University, chewing gum can help you stay focused on long tasks. The researchers used an audio task and short-term memory recall to determine if chewing gum would help with concentration.
The study involved 38 participants being split in to two groups. Both groups completed a 30 minute audio task that involved listening to a list of numbers from 1-9 being read out in a random manner.
Participants were scored on how accurately and quickly they were able to detect a sequence of odd-even-odd numbers, such as 7-2-1. Participants also completed questionnaires on their mood both before and after the task.
Results showed that the gum chewers had quicker reaction times and better results compared to participants who didn’t chew gum. And even though the non-chewers started off better in the task, the chewers overtook them by the end.
(Story materials from Cardiff University. Image via Threadless.)
I visited the State Fair of Texas today. I visit every year, primarily to taste the latest fried food creations. Out of the ones I tried, my favorites were the Deep-Fried Divine Chocolate Tres Leches Cake and the Picnic on a Stick. Both were good, though still not as good as fried butter or a fried peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.
There is also a Chinese Lantern Festival at the fair this year. It’s reasonably priced before sunset, but once it gets dark it gets expensive. Still, after dark offers opportunities for some good photos. I took the one below, and I like the Ferris wheel in the background, which everyone should ride once in their lives.
There’s a great part in Bill Cosby: Himself when he tells a story about cooking breakfast for his kids at 6 a.m. Instead of serving standard breakfast fare, he gives his children chocolate cake. It’s a funny story, because of the absurdity of serving cake for breakfast. However, Cosby may have been on to something.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University have discovered that dessert can help dieters lose more weight–and keep it off in the long run–if they make it a part of their breakfasts.
You should focus on indulging in the morning. That’s when your body’s metabolism is its most active, and when you’re better able to work off the extra calories throughout the day, the researchers say.
Attempting to avoid sweets entirely can create a psychological addiction to these same foods in the long-term, explains Professor Daniela Jakubowicz. Adding dessert items to breakfast can control cravings throughout the rest of the day. Over the course of a 32 week-long study, detailed in the journal Steroids, participants who added dessert to their breakfast–cookies, cake, or chocolate–lost an average of 40 pounds more than a group that avoided such foods. What’s more, they kept off the pounds longer.
It seems pretty common sense that eating more calories in the morning would help curb cravings later in the day.
Highly restrictive diets that forbid desserts and carbohydrates are initially effective, but often cause dieters to stray from their food plans as a result of withdrawal-like symptoms. They wind up regaining much of the weight they lost during the diet proper.
The study’s participants consumed the same daily amount of calories, but “the participants in the low carbohydrate diet group had less satisfaction, and felt that they were not full.”
Their sugar and carb cravings were more intense and they chose to cheat on their diets plans.
“But the group that consumed a bigger breakfast, including dessert, experienced few if any cravings for these foods later in the day,” Jakubowicz said.
It looks like I’ll be eating fewer eggs and more cake for breakfast now. Come to think of it, bacon cake sounds delicious.
Bonus: The cake story in Bill Cosby: Himself
(Photo via Flickr: Slice of Chic / Creative Commons)
Your sweet tooth is more than a preference for desserts. It’s also an indicator of your personality and behavior, according to a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Let’s read the study’s abstract together:
It is striking that prosocial people are considered “sweet” (e.g., “she’s a sweetie”) because they are unlikely to differentially taste this way. These metaphors aid communication, but theories of conceptual metaphor and embodiment led us to hypothesize that they can be used to derive novel insights about personality processes. Five studies converged on this idea. Study 1 revealed that people believed strangers who liked sweet foods (e.g., candy) were also higher in agreeableness. Studies 2 and 3 showed that individual differences in the preference for sweet foods predicted prosocial personalities, prosocial intentions, and prosocial behaviors. Studies 4 and 5 used experimental designs and showed that momentarily savoring a sweet food (vs. a nonsweet food or no food) increased participants’ self-reports of agreeableness and helping behavior. The results reveal that an embodied metaphor approach provides a complementary but unique perspective to traditional trait views of personality.
The part about increased agreeableness through sweets fascinates me. Do this mean you should bring sweets with you before every meeting? What does it say about someone who doesn’t like sweets? Does a preference for chocolate over hard candy indicate a different type of sweet and agreeable personality? So many questions.
(Photo credit via Flickr: Keith Macke / Creative Commons)
We had another successful BaconFest this year, and I’d like to thank everyone who attended and everyone that entered the contest. Congratulations to our winners: Art, Michael, and Marj. Some photos can be found here.
Here’s some news to chew on.
Send to Kindle
