Here's Why Our Brains Love 'Junk Food'

It's unfortunately true. Most of us prefer junk food over healthier food choices, but is it simply because they taste better?

Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre discovered that our brain is making bad decisions more so on a food's caloric content that primarily what it tastes like.

The study was based on brain scans of healthy participants who were asked to examined pictures of various foods and rate which foods they would like to consume. Then, they were asked to examine the calorie content of each food. Surprisingly, they found that they were poor at accurately judging the number of calories in the various foods. However, their choices and their willingness to pay still centered on those foods with higher caloric content.

"Earlier studies found that children and adults tend to choose high-calorie food" said Dr. Alain Dagher, neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital and lead author of the study, in a news release. "The easy availability and low cost of high-calorie food has been blamed for the rise in obesity. Their consumption is largely governed by the anticipated effects of these foods, which are likely learned through experience. Our study sought to determine how people's awareness of caloric content influenced the brain areas known to be implicated in evaluating food options. We found that brain activity tracked the true caloric content of foods."

Decisions about food consumption and caloric density are linked to a part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area that encodes the value of stimuli and predicts immediate consumption.

Understanding the reasons for people's food choices could help to control the factors that lead to obesity, a condition affecting 1 in 4 Canadian adults and 1 in 10 children. Obesity is linked to many health problems including high blood pressure, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Treating Canadians who have these problems costs billions of tax health dollars.

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Psychological Science.