Is your appetite not up to the mark? Are you not able to achieve your ideal weight because of poor appetite? Here’s the easiest solution to boost your appetite. Having your food in front of a mirror can help you great deal to improve appetite. Even if you imagine yourself eating is as good as having food with a company. This makes food tastier and appealing, especially for elderly who have lost their interest in food. A recent study has shown.
When you eat food with a friend or another person, you tend to eat more as compared to when you eat alone. This phenomenon is called ‘Social Facilitation of Eating’. Many studies have shown that for elderly, enjoying the meals is linked to quality of life. If they eat frequently alone, it is associated with depression and loss of appetite.
In the study, the researchers have concluded that people who eat alone when saw themselves eating in a mirror found the food tastier than before. They even ate more as compared to when they eat without a mirror.
"Our findings suggest a possible approach to improving the appeal of food, and quality of life, for older people who do not have company when they eat--for example, those who have suffered loss or are far away from their loved ones," Nobuyuki Kawai from Nagoya University in Japan.
However, the effect of "social" facilitation of eating when a mirror was present was also observed in young participants, the researchers reported in the paper published in the journal Physiology & Behavior. Further, when mirror was replaced with photos of the volunteers eating, the volunteers still experienced an increase in the appeal of food and ate more. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, a static image of a person eating seems sufficient to produce the "social" facilitation of eating, the researchers said.
(With IANS Inputs)
