Hunger shifts attention towards less healthy food options, study finds

Summary

by Emily Packer, George Litchfield, eLife Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain New research suggests that when people are hungry, they focus more on the tastiness of food and tend to ignore nutritional information, which may contribute to poor dietary decisions. The study, published as a revised Reviewed Preprint in eLife, is described as important by the eLife editors. They say the well-designed experiments—including choice behavior, eye-tracking and state-of-the-art computational modeling—yield compelling evidence to support the conclusion that people who are hungry prioritize tastiness over healthiness in their food choices. Despite existing public health initiatives, the prevalence of obesity has been steadily increasing in many countries. According to the World Health Organization, worldwide adult obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and adolescent obesity has quadrupled. In 2022, 2.5 billion adults were overweight, and of these, 890 million people were living with obesity—which can significantly increase the risk of developing serious health conditions, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and certain types of cancer. Throughout a single day, we make several decisions about what to eat, and these choices are largely influenced by our environment. For example, it has been previously demonstrated that nutritional scores on food options can increase the likelihood of healthy choices. On the other hand, it has been shown that a hungry decision-maker is more likely to make unhealthy choices. "A preference for energy-dense foods is likely an evolutionary adaptation to ensure survival under conditions of scarcity. However, as high-caloric food options have become more easily available and affordable, this neurobiological mechanism to reward the consumption of calorie-dense foods is likely a contributing factor to the global surge in obesity rates," says co-author Jennifer March, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology and Hamburg Center of Ne...