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Video Game Playing Increases Food Intake In Teens

Posted by Soulskill on from the om-nom-nom dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There have been plenty of anecdotal associations between gaming and obesity. Now Canadian and Danish researchers have tested the hypothesis that video game playing leads to increased spontaneous food intake; a true test of causation vs. correlation. Their conclusion? 'A single session of video game play in healthy male adolescents is associated with an increased food intake, regardless of appetite sensations (abstract).'"

3 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting... by arunce · · Score: 5, Interesting

    is that when I was young I didn't eat anything and had my parents yelling at me to eat something while playing.

    1. Re:Interesting... by pnot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The researchers collected a very small collection of similar anecdotes

      No, they conducted a scientific randomized crossover study where they actually applied video game playing as a controlled intervention and measured caloric intake. That's very different from collecting 22 slashdot posts of "OMG I played games and got fat". As to "very small" -- the results for the two experimental runs were significant at P-values of 0.01 and 0.05; it's pretty clear-cut.

      There is no indication of what kind of games were played

      "The video game FIFA 09, a soccer video game played on Xbox 360 (Microsoft, Redmond, WA), was selected on the basis that the game is easy to learn, is popular, and can be played in 1 h." (p. 2 of the paper).

      or what long-term effects might be

      No, because that's not what they were studying. You can't cover everything in a single paper.

      The results apply only to a single session of gaming, and not to habitual gamers.

      Sure. This is an 8-page report on a single experiment. It's not a review paper. At some point there will be enough data from various studies to synthesize a systematic review, but someone has to publish the data from the individual experiments first!

      The headline is crap as usual

      No, the headline is consistent with the conclusion of the paper. Playing the video game did indeed increase the food intake of the subjects.

      the study doesn't really involve correlation vs. causation at all.

      True, the issue of correlation vs. causation is not discussed in the study, presumably because it's fairly well-known that a crossover randomized controlled intervention study like this is precisely what you do to establish causation (since there's already plenty of data on correlation out there). But perhaps you have some comments on deficiencies in the experimental design?

  2. Re:Video Gaming and Video Gaming by artor3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I consider myself a gamer, and I don't even know what you mean. What is the difference between video gaming with and without scare quotes?

    At any rate, their finding was that once you finish gaming, you eat more. As in, if Bob spends some hours gaming, and Dave spends those same hours reading, and then they both go get lunch, Bob will eat substantially more than Dave, all other things being equal. (And yes, they accounted for the marginally higher number of calories burned by gaming as compared to resting -- the difference is only 20 Calories/hour, before you go trying to plan an exercise regimen around it.)

    My guess? Playing a game tricks your brain into thinking you're being more active than you are, and so afterwards your brain subconsciously instructs you to eat additional calories to make up for that activity. If I go jog a mile around town, I'll eat more afterwards. If I "jog" a mile around Azeroth, my brain will still tell me to eat more, even though I don't need to.

    Of course, my theory is predicated on these results being from an action game (which may not be the case; the full text of the article is behind a paywall). If they were playing Civ5, then I have no idea why they'd be more hungry afterwards.