Foods May Taste Better If You’re Sitting

At parties, picnics and food trucks everyone eats standing up, but science suggests that we would all enjoy food much more if we sat down.

Posture (that is, whether you are sitting or standing) affects your sense of taste. And researchers at the University of South Florida say that sitting makes food taste better.

They found out how the vestibular sense (which deals with balance, posture and spatial orientation) works with the senses that deal with taste.

Standing for even a few minutes, they found, increases physical stress and deactivates the taste buds.

To confirm the finding, marketing professor Dipayan Biswas asked 350 people to rate the taste of pita bread chips. People who ate standing found that the chips were less tasty than those who ate sitting in a padded chair.

The same happened with chocolate sponge cake. But when a lot of salt was added to the recipe, the result was reversed. People who were seated found the food unpleasant, while those who were standing did not notice the extra salt and declared that the food was tastier than the ones that were sitting.

“This finding suggests that perhaps parents could make healthy foods with an unpleasant taste seem more appetizing to reluctant children if they cause them to eat standing up [instead of sitting],” Biswas said in a university news release. . “Similarly, it may be beneficial to remain standing when consuming pharmaceutical products that have an unpleasant taste.”

Biswas also asked participants to eat fruit snacks while holding shopping bags, similar to sampling at a supermarket or food court. Regardless of whether they were sitting or standing, the participants stated that additional weight and stress made the food taste worse.

Finally, to assess the perception of temperature, the researchers also gave participants hot coffee. In comparison with those who were sitting, those who were standing said that their temperature was not so intense. They also drank less.

The takeaway is: eating standing could help people lose weight, because they tend to consume less when they are standing. In addition, the physical stress of standing could burn more calories.

 The report was published in the June 7 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.