Trying to control what you eat while watching TV is like walking through a minefield. Every fast-food commercial, with appetizing images of grilling burgers, crispy fried chicken, and sauce dripping in slow motion, threatens to make you lose your resolve. But we are all in the same boat.
A new one, published earlier this month in the magazine Appetite shows how food stimuli can lead us to snack, even when we are completely satiated.
“Obesity has become one of the biggest health crises globally,” he said. Thomas Sambrookresearcher at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study, at the British university.
“Obesity It’s not simply a matter of willpower — is a sign that our food saturated environments and learned responses to tempting stimuli are overcoming natural appetite control mechanisms.”
To study the effect of food stimuli on the brain, Sambrook and his team of psychologists hooked up 76 volunteers to an EEG machine and monitored their brain activity while they played a food-based game. rewards.
When participants responded correctly, they were shown an image of a snack; when they made a mistake, they saw a photo of an empty plate. In the middle of the experiment, they were served a meal with one of the snackswho ate until they were completely satiated.
Unfortunately, the brain didn’t get the message. Despite the participants being satiated and reporting a much smaller desire to eat those foods — something confirmed by their behavior — the brain regions associated with rewardss continued to activate when they were shown images of them.
“Even when people know they don’t want that foodeven when their behavior demonstrates that they no longer attribute value to them — the brain continues to fire ‘”reward!” signals. the moment it appears,” explains Sambrook. “It’s a recipe for overeating.”
According to researchers, this suggests that our response to stimuli occursand independent form of consciousness.
According to , the team also found no relationship between participants’ ability to make goal-oriented decisions and brain activation when they were shown images of food in a state of satiety.
In other words, even people with solid self-control continue to be betrayed by the brain itself. “No wonder resisting a donut can seem impossible“, concluded Sambrook.
Still, there is some comfort in knowing that we are all in the same boat. Maybe not as much as the comfort that a snack in the middle of the night gives us, but that’s it.
