Why are we more passionate about junk food?

Recently, researchers from McGill University and others have said through research that when faced with the choice of eating pizza or salad, it is not only the taste of the two, but it is related to our brain; when we browse the menu Or when we read the words on the supermarket shelves, our brains calculate the calories contained in various foods.

The study was published in the international journal Psychological Science. The researchers used healthy individuals to browse pictures of different foods and then scanned the individual’s brain. Then the participants were asked to choose the food they like to eat and estimate the calorie content of these foods. The results show that participating individuals are not able to accurately determine the calorie content of their favorite foods, and their desire to choose and purchase tends to focus on those high calorie foods.

Researcher Alain Dagher said that early studies found that children and adults are more likely to choose high-calorie foods. However, readily available and inexpensive high-calorie foods are often considered to be the main cause of increasing individual obesity; food consumption is mostly It is determined by the expected effects of food. In this study, researchers tried to uncover how people’s awareness of calories is affected by the regions of the brain involved in food assessment. The researchers found that brain activity is actually tracking real food. Heat.

The determination of calorie and food intake is directly related to the medial prefrontal cortex in the brain, which encodes the level of stimulation and predicts individual instant food consumption. The mechanism that reveals people's food choice may help control the factors that cause human obesity. Obesity is directly related to many health problems such as hypertension, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.