Attentional Biases and Obesity

            Obesity is a pervasive health problem in the United States and the greater developed world today. It leads to overall lower quality of life as well as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and much more (cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html). In her talk, Jennifer Beshel pointed out the cost that Americans are paying because of the obesity crisis. She also discussed her research on an obesity model in Drosophila and how food odors influence the feeding patterns of flies.

In a similar study, “Weight Status and Attentional Biases Towards Foods: Impact of Implicit Olfactory Priming, they studied the attentional biases in people of different weight status as well as whether implicit and explicit exposure to olfactory cues (odors) modified attentional bias towards food in both normal weight and overweight individuals. They hypothesized that overweight individuals would have stronger attentional biases toward foods than the other participants while the olfactory prime type (implicit vs explicit) would have priming effects that would ultimately differ between the two experimental groups. To measure attentional biases, the researchers adapted the visual probe task. Their results supported the conclusions of previous studies. Overweight individuals did have higher attentional biases than normal weight individuals.  They also found that overweight individuals have a specific “cognitive sensitivity” to food odors during the implicit exposure trials. The researchers suggest that further studies should focus on training our attentional biases to choose healthier food options.

Both studies offer a possible explanation for why our brains have come to favor less healthy options. In the New York Times article, “Giving the Poor Easy Access to Healthy Food Doesn’t Mean They’ll Buy it,” they found that when healthy options were introduced into former food deserts the resident’s diets did not change. They found that the cost of the food as well as their shopping and eating habits were more influential than greater access. Perhaps changing people’s attentional biases can help change these ingrained unhealthy habits.

Works Cited

Beshel, J., and Y. Zhong. “Graded Encoding of Food Odor Value in the Drosophila Brain.” Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 33, no. 40, Feb. 2013, pp. 15693–15704., doi:10.1523/jneurosci.2605-13.2013.

Mas, Marine et al. “Weight Status and Attentional Biases Toward Foods: Impact of Implicit Olfactory Priming.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 10 1789. 9 Aug. 2019, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0178.

Sanger-katz, Margot. “Giving the Poor Easy Access to Healthy Food Doesn't Mean They'll Buy It.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 8 May 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/upshot/giving-the-poor-easy-access-to-healthy-food-doesnt-mean-theyll-buy-it.html.