The next time you reach for a chocolate bar over an apple, you can say that your brain forced you do it.
Consumers are more likely to want to eat -- and will pay more for -- foods that their brain tells them have a higher number of calories, according to researchers at McGill University in Montreal.
According to the study, food choices have far less to do with taste and much more to do with caloric content.
“We studied the mechanism by which our brains compute value when we’re making a choice,” said lead author Dr. Alain Dagher, a neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute. “So when we’re trying to choose between options, there are parts of our brain that assign value to each option in order for us to decide the most advantageous one.”
Dagher said the study found that the thing that drives the decision is the caloric density -- or how many calories are in the food.
“This (caloric density) was more important than how much you liked the food … the conclusion of the study is that the driver of wanting for foods is how many calories it has,” Dagher said.
Dagher said it is possible to fight the urge, and to instead opt for a healthier choice.
“When we make decision about food, if we know that the foods that are appealing to us will tend to be unhealthy, high calorie food, we can perhaps override that decision,” Dagher said.
Dagher and his team conducted brain scans of study participants as they asked them to look at pictures of different foods. The participants then rated the foods according to which they would like to eat. They were also asked to estimate the number of calories in each item.
The study subjects performed poorly when estimating the calorie counts, according to the findings. However, when choosing which food items they most wanted to eat, they were far more likely to make choices and pay more for foods that did, in fact, have a higher calorie count.
The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science.
The study replicates previous research, which has found that children and adults tend to prefer high-calorie foods.
Dagher and his colleagues wanted to look at whether an awareness of a food’s calorie count had an impact on the part of the brain that governs making food choices.
The part of the brain linked to decisions about foods to eat and calorie counts is called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
This region evaluates foods and predicts “immediate consumption,” according to the study. It was the part of the brain that showed increased activity when subjects viewed the higher-calorie foods.
“The way we know that food has calories is through experience. So when you consume junk foods -- Coke, Pepsi, potato chips, whatever -- those calories enter your brain and your brain learns that these foods contain calories. Partly our brains to a certain extent are wired to desire calories,” Dagher said.
This suggests that “the reward value of a familiar food is dependent on implicit knowledge of its caloric content,” the study concluded.
Findings could help battle obesity
The researchers note that understanding how consumers make food choices could aid in the fight against obesity. Current statistics suggest that one in four Canadian adults is obese, as is one in 10 Canadian children.
“The easy availability and low cost of high-calorie food has been blamed for the rise in obesity,” Dagher said.
Dagher said public policy could help curb the fight against obesity in the same way, noting that the cost of cigarettes deters smokers from smoking more often.
“For example, raising the price on the pack of cigarette, had an effect on consumption. Similarly, if we know that people value high-calorie foods, making those foods perhaps more expensive, and subsidizing healthier foods, might switch the decision-making,” Dagher said.
Obesity is linked to a number of ailments, from high blood pressure to heart disease to Type 2 diabetes, and it costs billions of dollars to treat these conditions, the researchers note.
