Eating while driving can be as potentially risky as using a hand held mobile phone at the wheel, according to research.

Brunel University put 26 participants in a simulator on an urban route, once without eating and once while eating from a bag of wrapped sweets or drinking water.

The simulator would show a pedestrian suddenly stepping into the road and then measure the drivers' responses.

Although participants tended to slow down while unwrapping the sweet or raising the bottle, researchers found that they were still twice as likely to hit the pedestrian.

It is probably using the brain to do something else as well as driving that causes the difficulty: tipping the bottle, trying to see around it and not spilling the contents is a complex set of judgements adding to the driver's workload.

There is of course no legislation specifically preventing eating or drinking while driving.

But common sense is the key: putting a mint in your mouth before you start driving, for example, is unlikely to cause a problem but leaning over to find a packet of mints in your glovebox, then attempting to unwrap them with one hand is quite a different (and a potentially dangerous) scenario.