Education alone not enough to prevent obesity

OVERWEIGHT people react very differently to real food and inedible images of snacks displayed on a computer screen, a study has found.

In tests, both overweight and lean volunteers made similar decisions when given food choices in the form of images.

But it was another story when they were offered an all-you-can-eat buffet of real food, including sandwiches, desserts, and drinks.

While lean and overweight participants were equally attracted to foods rated as tasty, the latter were more likely to go for the unhealthy, fattening items.

Lead researcher Dr Nenad Medic, from Cambridge University, said: “There’s a clear difference between hypothetical food choices that overweight people make and the food they actually eat.

“Even though they know that some foods are less healthy than others and say they wouldn’t necessarily choose them, when they are faced with the foods, it’s a different matter.

“This is an important insight for health campaigners as it suggests that just trying to educate people about the healthiness of food choices is not enough. The presence of unhealthy food options is likely to override people’s decisions.”

For the study the researchers recruited 23 lean and 40 overweight individuals, who were first asked to rate 50 common snack foods presented on a computer screen.

Body weight had no bearing on the decisions made during this task.

In the “buffet” experiment overweight participants consumed comparably more unhealthy foods than lean participants.