New trick to resist junk food- ‘Consider the healthiness’ before picking food

Washington: Tried every possible thing to avoid junk food and eat a healthy one but nothing worked? Well, then try out this new formula.

A new study has shown that thinking about your health before picking a food may make you more likely to make a healthy choice even if you don’t think it’s tasty, reports Live Science. Researchers from the California Institute of Technology conducted a brain-imaging experiment with 33 adult participants who had fasted for at least three hours. While lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, each participant was shown images of 180 different food items, varying from chips and candy bars to apples and broccoli. To test whether food choices can be influenced by shifting attention toward health, the researchers gave participants one of three instructions: “Consider the healthiness,” “Consider the tastiness” or “Make decisions naturally.” The researchers found that when the participants were instructed to think about healthiness, they were less likely to eat unhealthy food, even if they considered it tasty. They were also more likely to eat healthy food, including what they had rated as untasty. The researchers already knew that everyone uses the same area of the brain, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, when deciding what to eat, but the new scans revealed that a second brain area, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, comes to life when a person is using self-control during the decision-making process. The researchers also found that being asked to think about healthiness led subjects to say no to foods more often than they did when asked to make decisions naturally. ANI