Can’t resist the biscuit tin? It’s not your fault, it’s just instinct
THERE may finally be an excuse for those who seem to make their way towards the biscuit tin every time they enter the kitchen.
We can recall where high-calorie foods are located much more easily than low-calorie choices, a study has found.
This may be a hangover from our hunter-gatherer days, when food was scarce and it made sense to stock up on the most caloriefilled foods available.
Researchers led by Wageningen University in the Netherlands put 512 participants into a room with food, or food smells, at different pillars as they walked around.
The high-calorie foods included peanuts and chocolate, while low-calorie ones included apples and cucumbers.
Given a map and asked where the different foods had been located, participants answered around 27 per cent more accurately on the unhealthy foods.
The university’s Rachelle de Vries, first author of the study which was published in the journal Scientific Reports, said: ‘It appears as if our minds are mismatched to our current surroundings. Our brains may still be preoccupied with searching for and locating calories, even though we have plenty of food around us and are unlikely to starve.
‘It means it is simply harder to remember where apples are than chocolate. However, we also want to emphasise that eating behaviour is highly complex, and many other f actors besides where food is located can play a role in our choices.’
Regardless of how hungry participants said they were, or how much they rated liking the foods in a questionnaire, they remembered the pillar locations of the high-calorie foods best.
Given a map after walking round the room eating or smelling foods, they identified the pillars with high- calorie foods behind them with 27 or 28 per cent higher accuracy than those next to lowcalorie foods.
The authors say it may help to explain why some people often find themselves heading towards high-calorie eateries such as fast food restaurants.