DEC 2

24: DEC 2

Still thinking about some issues in Monday's reading. Fast foods and industrial foods (IF) often involve sensory overload, high palatability, high glycemic responses, and lots of fats, salt, and sugar. It seems like it would follow from this that industrial foods are satisfying? Maybe. But maybe overstimulation can be under-satisfying.

1. IF is overstimulating. This produces conditioned over eating. (Kessler's emphasis)
2. IF is satisfying at the level of mouth taste and multi-sensory engagement, but it puts us out of sync with stomach and gut satisfactions. (glycemic response, sense of fullness, absence of fiber, etc.) So, IF is ultimately unsatisfying. Research suggests unsatisfying diets produce cravings. (Try to put together research on food satisfaction and craving in relation to IF)
3. Picture from the Reno heart diet. You can eat too much food and still not be satisfied. Just as you can be overfed and undernurished. Would this be equally true of a traditional cuisine? Arguably, you can't overeat a healthy diet. (Compare to other behaviors which humans tend to find addictive or objects of obsession. Sex and drugs.)

Kessler's focus is on overeating, but much of this seems to apply to patterns of unhealthy eating as well. So as you are thinking about today's research, even if you do not overeat, think about how well this also explains conditioning to industrial foods.

C27: Overeating becomes more dangerous.

Our brains are designed to focus on salient stimuli. Salient food drives overeating. Reinforcement learning. Role of memory, enhanced by multi-sensory stimuli, Once conditioning is strong, the desire to feel better can be overcome by the desire to follow the habit. Deep habits don’t trigger thought or reflection. (Note, that is a good thing.)

Hyperpalatable foods are hyper-stimulants. They are effective in creating conditioned hyper eating.

C28 What Weight-Loss Drugs Can Teach Us

Phen-fen - banned, but apparently effective in blocking obsessive thought about food and drugs. Indicates that they have similar underlying mechanisms.

Patient: “I’m there, the food is there, but I don’t feel like eating the food. It used to be that I would see the food and I would go completely nuts, and that doesn’t happen any longer.”

C29

Cues: example of being cued by a fast food place as you return from the gym. 147: “elaborated thought”. — brain works on details, connections, plan for getting reward. Sets up tension with conscious awareness. “If you eat the salient food today, it’s going to be more salient tomorrow because you have more positive associations with it. “

Priming: tendency to seek a food reward more intensely once it has been tasted. In studies of hunger, test subjects report higher levels of hunger during the first part of the meal. 149. Research supporting priming effect. Test subjects consumed more of the food they were primed by.

Emotions: some emotions drive overeating by reinforcing cues and priming. Sadness and Anger . In a brain imaging study (151), test subjects in whom a negative mood had been induced were more stimulated by the prospect of a milkshake than a control group.

Stress also exaggerates other stimuli. Profound stress can shut down appetite and emotion. Transition emotions (how we feel as we change activities) make us vulnerable.

C30

Expectations of satisfaction from a food or from eating reinforce the stimulus. Not everyone driven to obsession by this. The “white bear” problem. Suppressed thoughts can become more salient because they are suppressed.

C31: Conditioned Hypereating emerges

Research questions about hypereating. 158: obesity study showing that overweight women snacked more throughout the day than non. In another study obese test subjects were more willing to work for food rewards than other activities that they liked as well. Not so for non-obese.

Reno Diet Heart Study: used data to ask about associate of loss of control over eating, lack of feeling satisfied, and preoccupation with food. 50% of obese and 30% of overweight subjects showed these features. But 17% of learn. Those showing traits of conditioned hypereating more than 2x likely to be overweight early in life.

161: conditioned hyper eaters more likely to rate an aroma pleasant longer. In brain image, heightened response to cookies, etc.

C32: Tracing the roots of conditioned hypereating

70s researcher, Shacter — “externality” theory of obesity. Overeating from response to external cues, over internal. In his “cracker study” thin people reduced subsequent consumption of crackers, but obese did not. Theorized that they respond to presence of external stimulus over being partially full.