19 Reasons We Eat Tasty Food More Than We Should

Have you ever looked down at the half-eaten piece of foot-high chocolate-chocolate cake you are scarfing for dessert and asked yourself, “Why in the heck am I eating this?” Yeah, me, too.

People who study eating call eating huge, sugary desserts after a more than full meal like this hedonic eating. Hedonic eaters eat not because they are hungry or have a metabolic need for nutrients, but rather because their neuroendocrine systems linked to reward drive them to do it. This translates down to hedonic eaters eat more than they nutritionally need because it feels good to eat food that tastes good and somehow makes us feel good.

Researchers (Burgess, et al) have come up with 19 different reasons we hedonically eat highly palatable foods that, in more than small quantities, usually make us fatter than we would like to be. Burgess and some other University of Alabama Medical School (“Roll Tide!”) researchers compiled these 19 reasons into a quick test called the Palatable Eating Motives Scale (PEMS), which is used to help hedonic eaters realize why they eat so much of what they eat when, where, and how they eat it.

Examples of such palatable foods include:

• Sweets like chocolate, doughnuts, cookies, cake, candy, ice cream, other desserts.
• Salty snacks like chips, pretzels, and crackers.
• Fast foods like hamburgers, cheeseburgers, pizza, fried chicken and French fries.
• Sugary drinks like soda, sweet tea, milkshakes, and sweet coffee drinks.

This fixation with fattening foods may have something to do with Bama’s mascot being an elephant, but I digress.

Burgess and the Bama Docs asked people, “Thinking of all the times you ate these kinds of foods/drinks, how often would you say that you ate/drank them for each of the following reasons?” and had them pick a frequency level list of

• Almost never/Never
• Some of the time
• Half of the time
• Most of the time
• Almost always/Always

The reasons (20 here, but 1 was omitted from the tool) the people thought about comprised:

1. Because your friends want you to eat/drink them
2. So that others won’t kid you about not eating or drinking these items
3. To fit in with a group you like
4. To be liked
5. So you won’t feel left out
6. To forget your worries
7. Because it helps you when you feel depressed or nervous
8. To cheer up when you are in a bad mood
9. To forget about your problems
10. Because you like the feeling
11. Because it’s exciting
12. To get ‘‘high-like’’ feelings
13. Because it gives you a pleasant feeling
14. Because it’s fun
15. Because you feel more self-confident and sure of yourself (omitted from study)
16. Because it helps you enjoy a party
17. To be sociable
18. Because it makes social gatherings more fun
19. Because it improves parties and celebrations
20. To celebrate a special occasion with friends

If you go back and analyze these reasons carefully, then you may notice that many of them say similar things. Actually, these reasons can be categorized in four different general themes:

• Conformity
• Coping
• Enhancement
• Social

When you label each reason with its respective one of these themes you can see we hedonically eat for four general reasons.

2	Conformity	Because your friends want you to eat/drink them
8	Conformity	So that others won’t kid you about not eating or drinking these items
12	Conformity	To fit in with a group you like
19	Conformity	To be liked
20	Conformity	So you won’t feel left out
1	Coping	To forget your worries
4	Coping	Because it helps you when you feel depressed or nervous
6	Coping	To cheer up when you are in a bad mood
17	Coping	To forget about your problems
7	Enhancement	Because you like the feeling
9	Enhancement	Because it’s exciting
10	Enhancement	To get ‘‘high-like’’ feelings
13	Enhancement	Because it gives you a pleasant feeling
18	Enhancement	Because it’s fun
3	Social	Because it helps you enjoy a party
5	Social	To be sociable
11	Social	Because it makes social gatherings more fun
14	Social	Because it improves parties and celebrations
16	Social	To celebrate a special occasion with friends
15		Because you feel more self-confident and sure of yourself Question 15 was omitted from the analyses due to poor factor loading, consistent with a recent validation study of the DMQ-R

We eat to conform to peers, to cope with life, to feel better, and to be sociable. Why do we eat for these four reasons? Because somehow, someway, somewhere in our life we discovered hedonic eating makes us feel good and we like to feel good.

Now, knowing this, how can we get better control of our hedonic eating?

You can learn more about the PEMS here. Burgess, et al, Profiling motives behind hedonic eating. Preliminary validation of the Palatable Eating Motives Scale, Appetite 72 (2014) 66–72, accessed on February 27, 2017 at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mary_Boggiano/publication/257204266_Profiling_motives_behind_hedonic_eating_Preliminary_validation_of_the_Palatable_Eating_Motives_Scale/links/559d7a8108aeb45d1715cb20/Profiling-motives-behind-hedonic-eating-Preliminary-validation-of-the-Palatable-Eating-Motives-Scale.pdf