Nataly Daggy

Dr. Gates
15 February 2013
Playing video games increases food intake in adolescents: a randomized crossover study
Over the past ten years, the appeal of video games to children has grown enormously.
Nearly all children from the age of twelve to seventeen are involved in some type of video game
use. Based on observations, sedentary video gaming has been linked to an increase in weight
gain. This drove many researchers to study the effects that video games play in weight gain.
There have also been reports stating that the more time spent playing sedentary video games, the
less time that is spent on eating. The goal of this research was to determine if there is a direct
link between video gaming and energy balance. They hypothesized that the more time spent
playing video games, the more food they consumed, which led to an increased likelihood of
weight gain.
In order to conduct their experiment they recruited twenty-two healthy males from the
ages of fifteen through nineteen. All twenty-two participants were banned from smoking and had
to maintain a healthy body weight. During the six months before the experiment was conducted
they had to limit their exercise to less than three hours per week and limit their alcohol intake as
well. Twenty-four hours prior to testing, participants were restricted from performing any sort of
vigorous exercise and were required to show up in a fasting state. Participants were chosen at
random to engage in a one-hour video game. They were placed in a relaxing position where they
were required to remain seated while playing the game. All participants were engaged in the
same video game. The top three highest scorers were offered a prize with the highest score a
grand prize to encourage engagement in the game.
When the participants arrived in the morning they were given breakfast, which accounted
for twenty-five percent of the daily energy requirement. Two hours after all participants were
given the same breakfast; body mass index was collected as well as blood samples. For lunch the
participants were given spaghetti with Bolognese sauce and were allowed to eat until they felt
full. Immediately following lunch, participants were required to complete a dietary record.
Energy expenditure was measured after each one-hour experiment as well as heart rate.
Their results showed an increase in heart rate of all participants during the video game
play as compared to when they were in a quiescent position. Mental work load was considerably
higher during video game play as well. Another observation they noticed was an increase in
energy disbursement. There was no significant difference in their eating rate from breakfast and
lunch. After having played the video game, participants consumed a larger portion of food during
their libitum lunch as compared to breakfast. Overall their finding provided evidence that
adolescents consumed a larger caloric intake after having played video games for one hour.
The main author of this study was Jean-Philippe Chaput, along with a few others. Jean-
Philippe Chaput received his post doctorate in Physiology at the University of Copenhagen and
is currently a Junior Research Chair in Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research at a
childrens hospital. He is particularly interested in factors leading to obesity and has co-authored
around fifty scientific journals. I believe this increases the credibility on the research findings in
this article. I think this study could have been designed to include additional hypotheses. Rather
than including multiple hypotheses, this study only focused on one, which may have been a
missed opportunity given the good sized sample that was collected. Nevertheless, their
experiment did support their hypothesis that video game playing is accompanied by an increase
in food intake. The strengths presented in this study were the sample size and its uniformity.
They recruited only male participants within the ages of fifteen to nineteen who were considered
to be healthy, and limited them to an isoaloric meal before starting the experiment. Overall I find
the conclusions of this experiment to be interesting, but somewhat as expected. On average all
participants increased food intake after sedentary video game playing.