Our Brain is Better at Remembering and Finding Unhealthy Foods Compared to Healthy Ones

We all know that junk food tastes better than healthy foods. A study at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands tested to see if your brains can rember healthy foods or junk foods more. The participants in this study where give 8 food samples. Some of these food samples were healthy foods such as cherry tomatoes and apples. Other food samples were more unhealthy such as brownies and potato chips. They were also told to rate how they thought the food tasted. There was also 8 – scented cotton pads whose smell corresponded to one food product. After the participants tasted/ranked the foods they went into a room. They had to find each cotton sample in the room and figure out what food it corresponded to. The results showed that they were 30% more accurate at mapping unhealthy foods compared to healthy ones. According to Rachelle de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate in human nutrition and health at the university she says “ Our main takeaway message is that human minds seem to be designed for efficiently locating high-calorie foods in our environment,”. This shows that the human brain is hard wired to look for unhealthy foods over healthy foods. It is instinctual for humans to choose high – calorie, unhealthy foods. ​

our_brain_is_better_at_remembering_where_to_find_brownies_than_cherry_tomatoes_-_scientific_american.pdf
File Size:	229 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

---