Retrain your brain to like healthy food

Cape Town - 100918 - Professor and Head Division of Neurosurgery Graham Fieggen examines a MRI scan of a skull at Red Cross Childrens Hospital - Photo: Matthew Jordaan

Cape Town - 100918 - Professor and Head Division of Neurosurgery Graham Fieggen examines a MRI scan of a skull at Red Cross Childrens Hospital - Photo: Matthew Jordaan

Published Sep 2, 2014

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Johannesburg - Imagine you could retrain your brain to find carrots as delicious as cake and broccoli a good substitute for a burger.

New research published on Monday has shown it may be possible for overweight people to retrain their brains to prefer healthy low-calorie foods over unhealthy higher-calorie ones.

Scientists have suspected that, once unhealthy food-addiction circuits are established, they may be hard or impossible to reverse, subjecting people who have gained weight to a lifetime of unhealthy food cravings and temptation.

The research, published in the journal Nutrition & Diabetes, scanned the brains of men and women before and after a six-month weight-loss and behavioural-change programme and found that activity in the areas of the brain linked to addiction and learning had changed.

“We don’t start out in life loving French fries and hating, for example, wholewheat pasta,” co-author Dr Susan Roberts said.

“This conditioning happens over time in response to eating – repeatedly – what is out there in the toxic-food environment.”

To find out whether the brain can be retrained to support healthy food choices, Roberts and colleagues studied the reward system in 13 overweight and obese men and women, eight of whom were participants in a new weight-loss programme and five who were in a control group and were not enrolled in the programme.

Both groups underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans at the beginning and end of a six-month period.

Among those who participated in the weight-loss programme, the brain scans revealed changes in areas of the brain reward centre associated with learning and addiction.

After six months, this area had increased sensitivity to healthy, lower-calorie foods, indicating an increased reward and enjoyment of healthier food cues.

The area also showed decreased sensitivity to the unhealthy higher-calorie foods.

The authors hypothesise that several features of the weight-loss programme were important, including behaviour-change education and high-fibre, low-glycaemic menu plans.

“Although other studies have shown that surgical procedures like gastric bypass surgery can decrease how much people enjoy food, this is not very satisfactory because it takes away food enjoyment generally rather than making healthier foods more appealing,” said co-author Dr Thilo Deckersbach, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“We show here that it is possible to shift preferences from unhealthy food to healthy food without surgery,” Deckersbach added.

The Star

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