Exercise Campaigns May Encourage Extra Eating

New research suggests that campaigns to promote exercise may have an unintended consequence: they make people eat more.

In a study in the March issue of the journal Obesity, 53 college students were asked to judge a series of movie posters drawn from an actual exercise campaign and, on another occasion, a group of similar-looking posters that did not mention exercise. They were told they would be given a few raisins afterward, which they were to taste and rate. After the students looked at the exercise posters, they ate an average of 18 calories, but they ate only 12 calories after viewing the posters with no mention of exercise.

In a second test, 51 different students, told they were participating in a computerized test of hand-eye coordination, were randomly assigned to be exposed to action words like "active" and "go" typically used in exercise advertising. A control group was exposed to neutral words, like "pear" or "moon." Again, they were offered food and the results were similar: those who heard the action words ate more.

Dolores Albarracin, the lead author and a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois

March 06, 2009