New research designed to offer restaurateurs new ways to increase the consumption of their products suggests that food tastes better when we can touch it.

This research was directly conducted by Adriana Madzharov, specializing in sensory marketing, from the Stevens Institute of Technology - this has already been done in the field of coffee research, from which we learned that the smell of this aromatic drink can have a similar effect as a real drink of coffee on a placebo basis. The new experiment was published in the scientific magazine Journal of Retailing and is based on 4 independent studies, tracking how food affects us with our hands.

Let's start with the fact that, according to scientists, eating with hands most strongly affects people with high food self-control. It was they who had the most desirable attitude to meals consumed by hand and were willing to eat in this way much more than using cutlery. In the case of people who could not boast of high self-control in relation to food, none of these features were observed - they neither ate more, nor food was more attractive to them.

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Everything indicates that these two groups receive and process sensory information in a completely different way. Our research suggests that people who regularly monitor their food intake are more susceptible to triggers of the body's sensory response, making it more attractive, according to researchers. And what exactly did the research look like? In one of them 145 respondents were divided into two groups, one talked about careful food, diet and fitness, and the other was only told to enjoy life and not care about weight.

Both groups received cups full of mini-donuts, some with toothpicks and some without. Later, the respondents were asked to evaluate and, as it turned out, people who controlled their food on a daily basis rated the donuts they touched with their hands much better. This may suggest that touching food increases its attractiveness, which can benefit restaurants and catering companies, serving their customers more dishes to eat without cutlery. However, it cannot be denied that at the same time, there are fears arising from the obesity epidemic, because in such a situation encouraging people to eat more food does not seem reasonable, but as you know, marketing is governed by its own laws.

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