Is There Any Way to Avoid the Lure of Junk Food?
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David Parsons/iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Do you get a warm, fuzzy feeling when you daydream about brownies?
That’s probably true for a lot of people and might explain why it’s so hard to resist the temptation of junk food, according to Ashleigh Haynes at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.
Haynes, who’s getting her PhD in applied cognitive psychology, says that while we know that most snack foods and desserts aren’t doing our bodies any favors, we still think positively about them which Haynes says may have to do with evolution and our life experiences.
To test this, Haynes had nearly 200 people first rate four unhealthy foods from one to seven and then asked them to evaluate the snacks with positive and negative words. With that, they were then allowed to dig in.
Afterwards, Haynes assessed how much food was eaten during a ten-minute span. She discovered that the greater the negative implicit evaluation of junk food, the less tempted people were to eat it,
Hence, Haynes believes that it is indeed possible to retrain one’s self to replace positive associations with negative ones in order to reduce the lure of chocolate, french fries and the like.
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