Researcher Angela Incollingo Rodriguez was home with a newborn in 2019 when, during a quiet moment, she made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, took out her smartphone, and started scrolling.
She remembers all of that. What she doesn’t remember is eating the sandwich.
“I’d eaten the whole sandwich while I was looking at my phone and didn’t even enjoy it,” says Incollingo Rodriguez, assistant professor in the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies. “Researchers have long known that people eat more while watching television, but there is conflicting research on whether people eat more while using a smartphone. I wondered whether this distraction that I experienced while using my phone might signal a broader trend in eating behavior.”
The question prompted the first study that Incollingo Rodriguez, a health psychologist and behavioral scientist, launched in her Stigma, Eating, and Endocrinology Dynamics Lab after joining the WPI faculty. Beginning in fall 2019, she and her student researchers enrolled 118 WPI student volunteers in an experiment that was disguised as taste-testing research and divided them into groups. All participants snacked while using technology and while not using technology. When using technology, some participants used smartphones, and others watched television.
The paper, recently published in the journal Physiology & Behavior by Incollingo Rodriguez and co-authors Mira S. Kirschner and Lorena S. Nunes, revealed some expected results: Participants who snacked while watching television ate more than participants who ate without TV.
Other results, however, were surprising: Participants who snacked while using their phones did not eat more than participants who snacked without phones.
“This was a very interesting finding,” Incollingo Rodriguez says. “We know that smartphones are distracting, and we also know that when people are distracted, they eat more and their memory of eating fades, making them likely to eat more at later meals. It’s possible, though, that as people use their hands with a smartphone, their pace of eating slows. This research raises many questions about smartphones, memory, and eating.”
The way and amount that people eat matters because unhealthy eating contributes to diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Researchers estimate that an unhealthy diet accounts for 14% of deaths worldwide. Studies have also shown that eating while watching television can increase calorie intake.
Smartphones and other mobile technologies are well-known distractors, and they are everywhere. About 91% of Americans own a smartphone, and about 40% of adults say they are online almost constantly.
Incollingo Rodriguez, who is known for her research on weight stigma, says studying eating is important but requires some creativity.
“In a lab, it’s not enough to offer people food, because they typically will not eat,” she says. “If we pitch the experiment as a taste test, however, and tell participants we want their thoughts on the food, that lowers their barriers, and they will start eating.”
For the snacking research, the student volunteers were told they would be taste-testing new snacks that might be offered at the WPI campus center. Each student was placed alone in a room with two snacks.one sweet and one savory. Sweet snacks included hazelnut, fudge, and caramel M&M’s candies. Savory options included cheddar sour cream and chile limón potato chips.
“We picked out the weirdest, newest flavors so that participants would believe they were participating in taste tests,” Incollingo Rodriguez says.
In reality, Incollingo Rodriguez and her student researchers were weighing snacks, calculating how much the volunteers ate, and converting the weights to calories.
All participants were asked to fill out questionnaires while eating the snacks, but they weren’t told the true focus of the study until the very end.
Although the findings suggest that smartphone use did not drive increased eating, Incollingo Rodriguez says that does not necessarily mean smartphone use while eating is benign.
“We know that when people are distracted while eating, they tend to eat more,” she says. “We did not measure how much participants remembered about what they ate, and we don’t know if their memory impacted how much they ate later in the day.”
The researchers also did not examine what happens when people use smartphones like televisions, by streaming entertainment, while eating meals. For Incollingo Rodriguez, whose research was inspired by a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, many questions remain about technology’s impact on eating, human behavior, and public health.
"All of these questions are especially important for children, who are learning eating habits while growing up surrounded by technology,” Incollingo Rodriguez says. “We really need more research in this arena.”
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