People will drink about 30% more if the music is fast and loud. There is emerging evidence to suggest loud noises trigger less healthy food behaviours which might be because there’s so much noise, you can’t really taste what you’re eating.

Genre matters too: listening to jazz and classical...

There’s a reason the first bite of a chocolate bar tastes better than subsequent bites; the first bite is novel, then our taste buds become habituated. Even when the flavour of each bite or slurp is slightly different, if it looks the same our brain tends to assume that the taste also remains the...

We eat first with our eyes, and that dictates much of our experience. Indeed, by shaping our expectations, the appearance of foods has even been shown to influence what we taste when we eat them; so a big, beautiful salad boasting a variety of leaves and colours and textures won’t just look bette...

It is true that we tend to eat more in the company of others but one doesn’t want to recommend eating alone at least, not habitually. There are ways to enhance the sensory experience of a communal meal and encourage diners to focus on the food as well as the conversation. One is to get people inv...

Many of us now know that serving meals on a smaller plate can control how much we eat, because our brains believe there to be more food there than there actually is. This has a profound effect on satiety (how full you feel), yet the brain can also be fooled by the tools we use: heavier cutlery en...