Copycat diners

CHOOSE your dining partner with extreme care. He or she may exert far more influence over what you eat than you imagined, cautions a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Psychologists at Duke University, North Carolina, have found that we are such habitual social copycats that we often subconsciously mimic what the person in front of us is eating. In their lab tests, volunteers were up to 70 per cent more likely to choose one type of food from a choice of bowls if the person in front of them was already munching that type of snack. The effect worked even if the person had previously said that they wouldn’t normally pick that snack out of choice.

This unintentional propensity to mimic our companions’ (possibly dodgy) food choices further reinforces a gem of research-backed wisdom for dieters: beware who you eat with. Recent studies point to a quirk of human nature – we don’t instinctively know when we’ve eaten enough food. So we rely on visual cues instead, which can be distorted by sharing a table with an overenthusiastic eater. We tend to mimic the amount they consume as well as the type of food, says Brian Wansink, of Cornell University.

His experiments also show that we otherwise don’t have a clue how much we consume. When he asked volunteers to sup from soup bowls that were secretly being refilled from a tube underneath, they ate, on average, about three-quarters of a bowlful more without noticing. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, the bottomless soup-bowlers were convinced that they had eaten the same as people with ordinary soup bowls.

Eating amid heavy munchers, such as in all-you-can-eat restaurants, may also send our sense of satiety awry. A study last year on children indicates that we are primed to stuff ourselves when we’re in a crowd. The research found that children eat more, faster and for longer when in larger groups.

Humans may have a primitive group-feasting response, where our survival circuits tell us to dive in before everyone else hogs the available food. The researchers conclude that the sight and sound of many other humans eating may override other signals of satiety.

Touch of reality

IF ROBOTS ever do try to take over the world, at least they will feel pain if you kick them. Scientists have created a new kind of artificial skin that could soon give robots – and artificial limb patients – the ability to feel heat, cold and pressure.

The Nasa-backed project has created smart “flesh” from thin layers of polymers and carbon nanotubes. John Simpson, a scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, says that the carbon does not set off the body’s immune system, which should help the developers to create sensors that plug straight into a person’s nerves from their robotic artificial limbs.

“By employing carbon nanotube technology, we can not only come very close to existing skin characteristics, we may even exceed them,” Simpson explains.

He adds that the material, called FILMskin, may behave as both a pressure and temperature sensor, as a flexible electrical conductor, or as part of a polymer material with mechanical and thermal properties similar to those of human skin.

Cold comfort

RUNNERS training for the London Marathon might be advised to add the probiotic lactobacillus to their diets. A report in the British Journal of Sports Medicine says that endurance athletes who took Lactobacillus fermentum capsules got over colds twice as quickly as fellow runners. Researchers at the Australian Institute of Sport say that intensive exercise can subdue runners’ immune systems.

Wee alert

A QUICK urine test may offer early warning of heart disease, reports a Glasgow University professor. Anna Dominiczak writes in the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal how her team studied more than 300 people and found 15 protein markers that indicate the presence of coronary artery disease. Her trials show that the urine test detects the disease accurately in 83 per cent of cases.

Migraine bug

LOCUSTS may help us to find new treatments for migraine, say Canadian biologists.

They have found that the locust’s reaction to high heat is similar to a disturbance in mammals that is associated with human migraines.

To shut down and save energy in tough conditions, locusts go into a coma that has many characteristics seen in people at the onset of a migraine. “There may be an evolutionary link between the two,” says Dr Mel Robertson, of Queen’s University, Ontario.

“It’s possible that the brain architecture for increased sensitivity also predisposes areas of some people’s brains to become overexcited, and that migraines provide a means of temporarily ‘shutting things down’,” he suggests.

The locust model may offer a simpler way to understand the phenomenon. The Queen’s scientists hope that it may offer a key to designing new migraine treatments.

Pooch juice

DOG owners: ever noticed the way that poor Rover looks sad and jealous whenever you sip from a bottle of posh water?

Now your poor pooch need never feel left out of the drinks fad again, thanks to the American beverage-maker Cott. It has announced plans for a new line of flavoured water for dogs, fortified with calcium and zinc.

The water bottles, at £1 a pop, will be sold in a range of flavours, including spearmint, lemongrass and peanut butter. The makers claim it will be beneficial for canine coats and bones. Wonder what it will do for the trees.

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