Some recent studies getting publicity this week show how influential our surroundings and environment can be in influencing our behaviour. All the more reason to cultivate mindfulness – awareness.
The first, about how obesity is socially contagious, was all over the mainstream media:
Author Professor Nicholas Christakis said: “It’s not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with.
“Rather, there is a direct, causal relationship. What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate body size.
“People come to think that it is OK to be bigger since those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads.”
I wonder if all my skinny friends are going to ditch me now. 
The second group of studies show how the subconscious brain picks up on clues that it then transfers to unrelated situations:
In another experiment, published in 2005, Dutch psychologists had undergraduates sit in a cubicle and fill out a questionnaire. Hidden in the room was a bucket of water with a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid, giving off a faint odor. After completing the questionnaire, the young men and women had a snack, a crumbly biscuit provided by laboratory staff members.
The researchers covertly filmed the snack time and found that these students cleared away crumbs three times more often than a comparison group, who had taken the same questionnaire in a room with no cleaning scent. “That is a very big effect, and they really had no idea they were doing it,” said Henk Aarts, a psychologist at Utrecht University and the senior author of the study.
Hmm, I wonder if this is another reason that a tidy house makes me eat more healthy.
