Choosing “Healthy”
7/27/2011 | | Share

When you decide what to eat, not only does your brain need to figure out how it feels about a food’s taste versus its health benefits versus its size or even its packaging, but it needs to decide the importance of each of those attributes relative to the others. And it needs to do all of this more-or-less instantaneously. A previous study (see Rangel and Hare in Science, 2009) showed that a specific area of the brain, the dlPFC, comes to life when a person is using self-control during decision making. The new study (July 27 issue of Journal of Neuroscience) goes a step further, showing that there seem to be ways to help kickstart the dlPFC through the use of what Hare calls “external cues” that allow us to exhibit more self-control than we might have otherwise. “This increased influence of the health signals (cues about healthiness of specific items) on the brain results in an overall value for the food that is based more on its health properties than is the case when the subject’s attention is not focused on healthiness,” says Hare.

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