Do We Have an Internal Calorie Counter?

The Huffington Post:

Many explanations have been offered for the country’s obesity epidemic, and one is nutritional ignorance. People simply don’t know what a calorie is, so how can they be expected to know a calorie-rich food when they see one? Most of us don’t even know what a gram of apple or an ounce of milk looks like, so how can we possibly calculate a sensible portion?

Well, perhaps arithmetic is not required, and it may even be misleading. Psychological scientists in Canada have been studying how people make food choices, and it appears that our deliberate estimates and calculations may not be much use to us. Instead, we may implicitly know how fattening foods are, even when our estimates are way off. Indeed, our brains may respond to the true caloric density of foods, and guide our food choices.

Neuroscientist Alain Dagher of the Montreal Neurological Institute, working with colleagues there and at McGill University, wanted to see how awareness of caloric content influences the brain’s response to familiar foods. Specifically, the scientists wanted to compare explicit and implicit awareness of caloric content by measuring the brain’s response to both estimated and true caloric content of various foods.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post

Wray Herbert is an author and award-winning journalist who writes two popular blogs for APS, We’re Only Human and Full Frontal Psychology. Follow Wray on Twitter @wrayherbert.