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Let there be…less fat? In news that is surely not going to be easily digested by restaurant owners looking to sell more food to their patrons a new study has been released recently that shows that more relaxing  music and softer lighting reduced the amount of food that people eat when they are at a restaurant and also caused them to eat slower. Another finding of the same study showed that, even as they ate less, the people involved in the study enjoyed their food more and gave it better reviews than people who ate in regularly lit restaurants with normal, more frenzied music playing. The study was published in the journal Psychological Reports and found that, while the people on both sides of a modified Hardee’s restaurant ordered approximately the same amount of food, the people who ate theirs on the softer lit, more relaxed music side actually threw more of their food away or, in essence, ate less. This has interesting implications for customers who are interested in easting less and also eating slower.  Of course if you’re already going to Hardee’s you probably aren’t on a diet as the vast majority of their food would have to be considered ‘junk’ food or ‘fast food’ which is normally loaded with calories, salt, sugar and fat. Also this would seem to go against the fact that the reason they call it ‘fast food’ is because people can go there, order and eat much faster than at a ‘sit-down’ type of restaurant, presumably because they need to be somewhere or get back to their jobs. Restaurant owners who are considering changing out the lights in their restaurants to save electricity and cut down on harmful carbon emissions are sure to look at this data with dismay as it means that their customers will start ordering less of their product, which would be detrimental to their bottom line. Whatever the outcome it seems that, if you want to eat less, enjoy your food more and take more time actually eating it, changing the lights and softening the music seems to be the way to go.  Now if they could only create a type of lighting that will make the food at Hardees actually taste good they might be onto something.