People tend to eat more when eating with other people
When people eat together with other acquaintances or close friends, as in a family meal or eating with friends, they tend to eat more. This is called ‘social facilitation’ and is possibly traceable all the way back to basic human behavior, allowing people to survive better. The current analysis was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on 21 August 2019.
Prior research has shown that when people eat together, the amount of food they eat goes up by as much as 48% in some cases. Similarly, in a study on obese women, the amount of food eaten was about 30% higher when they ate socially, compared to eating alone. The longer duration of feeding that is typical with a shared meal, as well as the fact that in such a setting one is expected to eat, may also have a small influence on the increase in individual food intake at this time compared to eating alone.
The research that found this effect on food intake was carried out in the UK and Australia, and consisted of a meta-analysis of 42 studies of social eating.
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