False beliefs about junk food could help diet
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For some people, simply suggesting that they had a bad childhood experience with a certain food may cause them to think twice before eating it again, researchers reported Monday.
The implication, they say, is that false beliefs about food could serve as a basis for a whole new form of dieting—where, for instance, parents of a junk-food-loving teen tell him that a doughnut made him sick when he was 4.
In experiments with college students, the researchers found that they could make some believe that strawberry ice cream had made them sick as children, simply by telling them it had happened.
More to the point, some of these “believers” indicated that in the future, they would avoid the offending food.
If such manipulation works in the real world, said study co-author Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus, “we could be on the brink of designing a new dietary technique.”
But don’t expect false-belief dieting centers to start popping up.
“People won’t be able to go to a therapist and say, ‘Do this to me,’” said Loftus, a professor of social ecology at the University of California, Irvine.
The experiment, she told Reuters Health, worked in some cases only because the students were unaware of what the researchers were doing. They had been told only that they were taking part in a study of “food and personality.”
In reality, the research involved two experiments in planting false-beliefs, the results of which are published in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In each experiment, students filled out several questionnaires about food preferences and personality. When they returned to the lab a week later, they were told that their responses had been run through a special software program that had come to certain conclusions about them.
Some of the students were told, among other things, that as a young child, they had gotten sick after eating strawberry ice cream. Others were told a chocolate chip cookie was the offending food. A third group received no bad news about their history with the treats.
Subsequent questionnaires showed that between 20 and 41 percent of students in both experiments fell for the strawberry ice cream tale. Their regard for the food also fell, with some indicating they would likely avoid it in the future.
The manipulation did not work, however, when it came to chocolate chip cookies. The researchers speculate that because people generally eat chocolate chip cookies far more often than they do strawberry ice cream, it may be hard to shake a person’s faith in the cookie.
It’s also unclear, Loftus pointed out, whether false beliefs truly change a person’s eating habits—and not just their reported inclinations—and whether any such effect would be lasting.
Still, it’s possible that eating habits could be altered through a strategically planted false belief, according to Loftus. The scenario that comes to mind, she said, would be one in which parents tell their teenager that he or she had a not-so-sweet experience with a sweet in early childhood.
“People do cringe at the idea of parents lying to their children,” Loftus acknowledged.
But, she and her colleagues note in the report, the lie could also have a positive spin—like reminding a child how much she enjoyed asparagus as a tot.
SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Online, August 1, 2005.
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