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Music May Influence Your Food Choices as Well as Your Mood
Comfort foods are the go-to in louder dining areas.
Posted March 15, 2021 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Music’s ability to improve mood is well known. It has been shown to decrease anxiety and depression, increase focus, and generally make the listener feel good. A review of studies on the role of music in healing describes its efficacy in helping patients control pain, increase calmness, decrease anxiety, and even increase self-esteem.
Patients whose pleasure in daily activities was diminished by their depression were exposed to 50 minutes of classical music each day, or a session with a psychologist. Listening to Bach and Mozart had a significant effect on the women’s ability to enjoy life. In fact, they improved more than the group seeing the therapist.
Music is often an essential component of an exercise routine, be it a spin class or a long run, and playlists are tailored to enhance the intensity and duration of the exercise. Music may also have an indirect (but positive) effect on weight maintenance and loss if listening to it motivates a dieter to walk further, or participate in an exercise class.
However, music may also have a negative effect on mood, and in some situations influence whether or not people make healthy food choices. The type of music is unimportant; rather, it is the volume. As the loudness of music increases, it can have a direct effect on heart rate and arousal, according to the above-cited review in Advances in Consumer Research. Very loud music causes heart rate and general arousal levels to increase, and those hearing the music often become more excited than when listening to quieter music.
Restaurants often increase the volume of the music to such a high level that diners must shout at each other in order to be heard. Recently while walking my dog, I passed by a restaurant whose noise level was so high that code compliance officers were called to make the restaurant reduce the volume. A server was standing outside a few minutes before the restaurant opened, and I asked him why the noise level was so high. “The restaurant owner does it deliberately. It gets the diners excited, there is a ‘buzz’ and people may order more food or more expensive wine,“ he told me. When I asked him how the diners could talk with such loud noise, he laughed and said, “Maybe they text each other instead.”
The effect of loud music on the eating habits of diners has not gone unnoticed. Producing a high state of arousal, or even stress, in diners is thought to weaken or remove their self-control over eating and drinking. Loud music may produce such an unpleasant sense of arousal in diners that they find themselves choosing high-fat and/or high-sugar 'comfort' foods in order to diminish their stress, according to the Biswas review. Conversely, eating in a relaxed environment with low levels of ambient music might have the opposite effect. Diners, relaxed and with increased self-control, may make wiser, healthier food choices, and perhaps consume less food.
The article by Biswas and colleagues describes experiments that manipulated the loudness of the music in a café to test its effect on healthy and unhealthy food choices. A low volume of music was associated with customers buying significantly more healthy items. In a follow-up study, patrons were given the choice of fruit salad or chocolate cake. More of them choose the fruit salad when the background music was low, while the chocolate cake consumption increased as the volume of the music increased.
One of the often-stated causes of the rise in obesity is the portion size of restaurant foods. Sometimes the size of a single serving begins to resemble the amount of food that would feed a family of four at home, and diners consume calories considerably in excess of what they should be eating. But are they provoked into eating gigantic portions of food because their ears are assaulted by extremely loud music? There has been concern about the impact of too loud music on hearing, but whether it has a measurable effect on food intake has not been adequately studied.
Should dieters be told to avoid restaurants where everyone has to shout to be heard and eat only in establishments where the patrons are able to talk softly and be heard? Should they attempt to self-monitor the effect of eating in a noisy establishment on their calorie intake and food choices? Perhaps programs on smartphones and fitness devices should include a site where the person recording the day’s food choices can indicate whether he or she ate in a noisy or quiet setting.
The calming effect of music on eating behavior should not be overlooked either: soothing anxiety, easing depression, decreasing stress, and increasing a sense of well-being. Would dieters or those trying to maintain their weight, be more successful if they listened to music that enhanced their mood while eating? Most of us have experienced the acute effect music has on lifting our mood, sometimes when we least expect it. A friend going through a very stressful period due to the rapid worsening of a spouse’s health told me how much she depended on music to get her through dinner. “Now that my husband no longer can eat with me, Mr. Mozart has become my dinner companion. Without him, I probably would eat only ice cream for supper, but his music makes eating alone bearable.“
Perhaps a new approach to supporting weight loss should be to use music to enhance better food choices and control over portion sizes. A playlist may be just as effective as a food list in helping dieters avoid emotional overeating, and is certainly much more entertaining.
