Eating Lunch at Computer Makes You Pig Out Later: Study

(CBS) Can hogging the computer at lunchtime cause you to pig out later in the day?

That's the suggestion of a new study from England, which showed that people who played a computer game while eating lunch ate more food later in the day.

The study, conducted at the University of Bristol, involved 44 men and women. Half ate a lunch consisting of nine different foods while playing computer solitaire. The other half ate the same lunch without any distraction.

After lunch, the solitaire group felt less full. And 30 minutes later, they consumed twice as many snacks as did members of undistracted eating group. And that's not all: when asked to recall what they had eaten for lunch, the computer gazers had more trouble.

It's not the first evidence to show that lots of "screen time" may be contributing to the obesity epidemic. Previous studies looking at the effect of TV watching on food consumption yielded similar results. As one of the study's authors, Dr. Jeff Brunsom, a reader in behavioral nutrition at the university, explained in a written statement, "This work adds to mounting evidence from our lab and others that cognition, and memory and attention in particular, play a role in governing appetite and meal size in humans."

How about a snack?