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A new study has found that those who eat a significant number of Big Macs and other salty foods may be more prone to gambling.
Matthew Browne from the Experimental Gambling Laboratory at Central Queensland University demonstrated that the same underlying personality traits that lead some people to over-consume alcohol, cigarettes and high energy goods could also indicated a predisposition to gambling.
What we're interested in is whether gambling, which doesn't involve the ingestion of a substance, can be thought of as consuming behaviour,'' he said.
170 participants were asked to rate themselves on the amount of salt used during cooking and at the dining room table when eating to help calculate a score. Snack food consumption and gambling questions were also asked to formulate a final score.
"If you're playing the pokies and you win, the lights go off and the machine makes noise, and this is similar to the rush you may get with biting into a Big Mac,'' Dr Browne said.
The same impulsive sensation-seeking trait that leads to over consumption of foods, for instance, can lead to over consumption of gambling, he noted.
"We've evolved to be sensitive to these certain substances,'' said Dr Browne. "They intrinsically give us strong sensations.''
-- Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com
