Music & Lighting

In lab tests, music and lighting can affect how much people eat. Now a study has found that changing the ambience of a fast-food restaurant to more of a fine-dining atmosphere lessened the amount of food people crammed into their pie holes. To quote the paper, "softening the lighting and music led people to eat less, to rate the food as more enjoyable, and to spend just as much. "That last finding means that fast food joints, which are accused of contributing to the obesity epidemic, might actually try it. The study was led by well-known eating behaviourist Brian Wansink from Cornell University and appears in the journal Psychological Reports.