Tuesday, April 12, 2016




Foods Impact our Decisions!
            By Sukhbir Thind


Have you ever thought about how fast food is affecting your decisions and your productivity! Making decisions between desert and a healthy snack may be really hard, but one needs to understand that food affects our productivity and the way we make our decisions.

Recent studies at California Institute of Technology suggest that when we make decisions especially when it comes to food choices, self-control plays a huge factor. Self-control depends mostly on how our brain incorporates the taste and health related factors. Cal Tech wanted to design an experiment that integrates taste and when taste affects our choices. Dr. Sullivan used 28 students and asked them to fast for four hours. Once these students had fasted for four hours they were asked to rate 160 different foods on a scale from -2 to 2. The rates were based in 3 factors, healthfulness, tastiness and the participants’ desires to eat it after their long hours of fasting.

Afterwards the participants had to pick which food to eat from a pairing system that paired 280 random pictures of the same food. The experimenters used a new technique that analyzed how the mouse cursor moved. So a participant can move their curser to an unhealthy food and then reconsider to a healthy food and click on that or vice versa. Cal Tech did this to understand and analyze the decision making process and time it takes for one to choose between taste and healthfulness, and which factor dominates the decision. According to their research people first choose taste over healthiness. The time it took for high self controlled participant to choose healthy was 200 milliseconds. The time it took for low self controlled participants to choose health was 323 milliseconds.
 
From this experiment, they also observed that if one can see the number calories enlarged on the label and see how much fat is in the food, they are less likely to eat it. Decisions are based on visuals as well as taste.

















This relates to Brain Sweis’s presentation at Loyola University of Chicago. Sweis is a medical student who is performing a study that involved decision-making and relates it to food choices and time. He used rats for his experiment to see if time plays a big role in their decision making for food choices or if food’s taste plays a bigger role even if the rat has to wait a long time. In this study, rats were given pellets that had a flavor of bananas, chocolate, and many other different fruits. The rat had to choose its path to go to the flavor, but there was a delay each time before the rat received the flavor. Some rats waited the extended delays for their flavor and some rats just skipped the long wait and moved on to other short delayed flavors. Some rats faced regret when they had to skip their favorite flavor and this regret is what caused the rats to wait at other stations even if the wait was longer for the flavor. This experiment helped one consider how time can play as an important factor in decision-making as well as the flavor or taste of the food. The more tastier the food, the more rats wanted the flavor and the longer they were willing to wait.

Now how do these two relate? When picking food, time and tastefulness play an important role over healthfulness for most people. Time plays an important factor when we are making a decision. When some people are busy and can’t prepare healthy foods, they buy fast foods.  They do not want to wait to make food and rather will take what comes more “easily” to them. People ignore the fact about fast foods and desserts being unhealthy. Later these decision come back to haunt them with health related issues. Another factor is desire, when one desires the food they are willing to do anything for it. This is a sad reality that people will do anything for the unhealthy foods at fast foods rather than eat the healthy vegetables that they can prepare at home because fast foods “taste” better. Just as the research at Cal Tech suggested that people moved their cursors to the unhealthy but then reconsidered before they clicked the unhealthy food. Taste dominated healthfulness. Cal Tech says that before one eats an unhealthy snack, they should be reminded of the calories and fats that are in the foods they are about to consume, so they can realize that unhealthy calories will affect them in the future. Visuals and enlarged labels can play a big role in preventing people to buy heavily contained calorie food.

So next time you stop at a fast food restaurant because you “want” fries and a burger, think about all the fats and oils that food has. Then evaluate all the healthy options you can make at home from a homemade burger to a fresh Cesar salad. Choices and decisions are important, but more importantly, making the right ones are the key to success.





References:

Article 1.


Image 1-http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0260/2057/files/boy-making-choice-decision.jpg?7942556593889947105


Image 3- https://static01.nyt.com/images/2011/01/25/business/Label1/Label1-articleLarge.jpg

Image 4- http://exposure-communications.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/foodforthought.jpg




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