Shopping hungry, a bad idea

Shopping hungry is a bad idea, not only in the supermarket.

We should be grateful to popular wisdom for providing us with valuable pieces of information that have allowed us to reach adulthood avoiding unnecessary falls down embankments, disease contagion or, who knows, even the occasional horse kick.

Hunger and shopping, a bad combination

Long before the existence of publications in scientific journals, the collective body to which we belong and which we call "people" already had on its lips a great deal of advice, sayings and customs that guide us on our vital route to a prosperous old age. However, it is worth remembering that, precisely because it does not depend on science, popular culture does not necessarily have to be very fine-tuned in its explanations of reality.

There is one piece of advice that has been repeated many times where this becomes evident: the recommendation not to go to the supermarket on an empty stomach. Today we know that the well-meaning mentors who repeated this rule were naive. Shopping hungry is a bad idea, yes, but not only when we go to the grocery store on an empty stomach. not only when we go to the market for foodbut also when we walk through the galleries of any other type of commercial establishment.

Hunger and the desire to buy come together.

A study recently published in PNAS has concluded that appetite can activate "acquisition" concepts and and behaviors related to "acquisition" in the abstract. in the abstract. This means that those who feel the purring of their stomachs getting closer and closer are more likely to buy anything on impulse. Hunger and rational purchasing do not seem to get along too well, whatever the context.

How could this conclusion be reached? Well, for example, experimenting with an object that is hardly useful in our daily lives and rather unrelated to gastronomy: the paper clip, also known as a binder clip. It is a small device that could well be the big brother of the conventional paper clip and is used to hold many papers. Thus, a research team set out to measure the number of binder clips that a series of volunteers took when they were told they could take home as many as they wanted.

The volunteers, of course, were part of two distinct experimental groups: hungry people and satiated people. The hungry subjects tended to take significantly more paper clips, but, despite showing this spontaneous fondness for office objects, they did not rate their haul any more positively than the satiated group. Hunger, it seems, sends the brain a single, unsubtle message. It says neither "this is very attractive to me" nor "how nice this is", nor even "I want food". The message is more, well: "I want.".

Now, it should be remembered that this experiment was conducted with objects that were free. What happens when money comes into play? You would think that when acquiring something has a cost we would let reason take over, right? To find out this point, data was collected in a commercial area. By scanning the shopping receipts of customers who had checked out and asking them a series of questions, it was possible to see how the hungriest people tended to buy more, eveneven taking into account their mood and the time they had spent looking at products.

Not falling into the trap

What lessons can we learn from the relationship between paper clips and stomach issues? Perhaps the following: given that in the outside world we are bombarded daily by advertising in all kinds of formats, it is advisable to not make it so easy for the big marketers. to the big sellers. Let's not put in our body, in addition to all the things we already have, the desire to buy anything.