Little Step No. 42
What to do:
Read this BEFORE you do your next food shop.
Why this step works:
This little step is more relevant at this time of year than ever, when supermarkets seem to be doing everything they can to make sure our cupboards are bursting with festive ‘treats’. During December, eating habits can shift dramatically towards energy dense, ultra-processed, junk foods, sugary snacks and desserts. And if you’d rather yours didn’t, reading this might be of some help.
A fascinating study was published in the journal Nature. Researchers wanted to find out whether our brains are hard-wired to remember where energy dense ultra-processed foods such as cookies, chocolate and brownies are stored, more readily than healthier foods such as tomatoes, apple and cucumber. Over 500 participants included in the study were asked to sample various foods in a maze. In one section of the maze the participants could see, taste and smell the foods, and in another section, they could only smell the different foods.
After their journeys through the maze, the participants were asked to complete a spatial memory test to identify how well they remembered the locations of each different food. The researchers found that participants were better able to recall the location of energy dense / ultra-processed foods than the healthier foods. And remarkably, they found this to be true even when participants only had the limited sensory information of smell to work from.
So why is it useful to know this before your next food shop?
This research suggests that we have an in-built subconscious memory bias towards energy-dense junk foods. In simple terms, this means our brains are hard wired to search them out when we know they're there. The key takeaway then is this - if you don’t want your diet to slide too much in favour of festive ‘treats’ over the next few weeks, know that willpower alone may not be enough. And you’ll be much more likely to succeed if you don’t bring them into your home in the first place. This is very relevant for office environments in the run up to Christmas too.
The aim of this little step is not to make you feel guilty for adding a pack of mince pies to your shopping basket, but rather to shine a light of awareness on to how our brains are wired, how this may be influencing our food choices without us even realising and what we can do about it.
It's a little step towards putting you back in conscious control of your food choices; something we could all do with a bit of extra help with at this time of year x
Reference: de Vries, R., Morquecho-Campos, P., de Vet, E. et al. Human spatial memory implicitly prioritizes high-calorie foods. Nature. Sci Rep 10, (2020)