• H2020
• Societal Challenges
• Health

A simple new computerised game could help people control their snacking impulses and lose weight.

Psychologists at the UK’s University of Exeter and Cardiff University have published a study that shows that participants lost an average of 0.7kg and consumed around 220 fewer calories a day whilst undergoing the week of training.

The team of researchers has developed a simple online computer game that trains people to resist unhealthy snack foods. The game requires people to repeatedly avoid pressing on pictures of certain images (e.g. of biscuits) whilst responding to other images (e.g. fruit, clothes), and therefore trains people to associate calorie-dense foods with ‘stopping’.

The team previously showed that this training reduces how much food people eat in laboratory tests.

Now their new study, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and published in the journal Appetite, has found that 41 adults who completed four ten-minute sessions of the training online lost a small but significant amount of weight and ate fewer calories (estimated from food diaries). The training also reduced how much the calorie-dense ‘stop’ foods were liked. The reduction in weight and unhealthy snacking was maintained six months after the study according to participants’ self-report. These effects were observed relative to a control group of 42 adults who completed the same ‘stop versus go’ training, but involving pictures of non-food objects (e.g. pens).

Commenting, Dr Natalia Lawrence, of the University of Exeter, lead researcher in both the original research and the new studies, said: “These findings are among the first to suggest that a brief, simple computerised tool can change people’s everyday eating behaviour. It is exciting to see the effects of our lab studies translate to the real world.

“This research is still in its infancy and the effects are modest. Larger, registered trials with longer term measures need to be conducted. However, our findings suggest that this cognitive training approach is worth pursuing: it is free, easy to do, and 88% of our participants said they would be happy to keep doing it and would recommend it to a friend. This opens up exciting possibilities for new behaviour change interventions based on underlying psychological processes.”

With support from the European Research Council, the research team is now planning to test the efficacy of stop training and other interventions in a large registered trial.