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Is Law & Order to blame for your weight gain?

Posted on Sep 11th 2008 1:00PM by Kristen Seymour

Filed Under: Diet & Weight Loss, Nutrition & Supplements

What do crime shows have to do with your waistline? Possibly a lot -- a recent study titled "Sweet Escape" showed that people who watched shows like Law & Order, The Closer, CSI, and other crime TV shows were likely to spend more on groceries and, subsequently, chow down more.

But why? It comes down to people facing their own mortality -- when they think about dying one day (not right away, but some day in the future), they tend to overspend, on food and on other items too.

This was slightly heartbreaking to me, because I'm a total Law & Order addict. However, I'm definitely going to be paying a little more attention to the way my eating habits are affected by my Tivo.

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Tags: crime tv, CrimeTv, diet, eating habits, EatingHabits, law and order, LawAndOrder, mortality, weight gain, WeightGain

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

EB 9-11-2008 @ 1:31PM

Correlation isn't causation. Maybe there is a common cause: crime shows appear more to an audience who *already* spends more on groceries, or maybe the same emotion that drives people to buy more is the same that responds to these shows. The article mentions this effect is more pronounced with people who have low self-esteem, and that is a far more salient suggestion than watching crime shows somehow causes people to eat more. I think as long as you watch how your eating interacts with your emotions and also try to preserve or strengthen "personality" factors like self-esteem, you can dismiss claims like "law and order makes you fat."