February 18, 2017 — It’s a complex puzzle. But your brain definitely responds in very complex ways when you spot some food. Food marketers know this at a practical level. They spend their lives figuring out ways to make you respond to images of their products. Neuroscientists are figuring it out at a more basic level. Functional MRI images […]
July 27, 2016 — A body of fascinating research is coming together to suggest that it might be possible to retrain the brain and alter its response to food cues in a way that provides meaningful reductions in obesity. The promise lies with interventions that use insights about brain responses to food and inhibit the brain activity that contributes […]
April 4, 2016 — Your brain’s response to food is one of the key tools that your body uses to protect you from starving or losing too much weight. Even bad food starts looking really good and thoughts about food crowd out everything else in the brain. In a featured presentation at ENDO 2016, Olivia Farr and colleagues demonstrated that […]
April 23, 2015 — Everybody knows that food cues all around us can affect how much we eat. Big servings, hovering relatives, food at hand, and food marketing all can have the effect of prompting us to eat a little more or something else that we don’t really want. Second-hand eating has even earned a place in the Urban Dictionary […]
February 28, 2015 — The difference between mice, men, and women is eluding health journalists who are churning out headlines about common food ingredients — emulsifiers — causing obesity, metabolic syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease. The study that prompted this enthusiastic reporting probes the effects of two very common emulsifiers — cellulose gum and polysorbate — on the microbiome […]
February 16, 2015 — In a stunning breakthrough, scientists have discovered that children are impulsive and immature. Publishing their findings in Eating Behavior, Astrid Junhans and colleagues uncovered “the necessity of improving children’s self-regulatory skills to support their desire to remain healthy.” In other words, they found that kids need to grow up. They made this discovery by comparing […]
January 8, 2015 — In dealing with obesity, it may be that healthy choices are overrated. Where you eat — healthy environments — may be more important than resolving to make healthy choices. How can this be? In a recent interview with NPR, psychologist David Neal explains: Once a behavior had been repeated a lot, especially if the person does it […]
