Adding healthy foods you have never liked to your diet may be easier than giving up the foods you enjoy, according to a new study.
Changing the Value of Favorite Foods Is Harder
Ifat Levy, a professor of comparative medicine at Yale School of Medicine, and researcher Alexandra Rich examined how existing food preferences interact with learning new values, the school said on the 18th. The findings were published in the international journal Communications Psychology.
The team recruited 279 adults to study how food preferences affect the process of learning new rules. Participants chose two snacks they liked and two they disliked, then learned rules that assigned points to each food through a computer game.
In the game, the points attached to each food were set as either positive or negative based on each participant's existing tastes. The researchers then reversed the point system to compare how quickly participants adapted to the changed rules. The experiment divided participants into a group that first encountered rules matching their existing preferences and a group that first experienced rules running counter to their tastes.
Participants tended to accept the rules readily when their favorite foods were assigned high points, the results showed. But when the conditions shifted so that the same foods drew negative points, they struggled to learn the new rules. Participants who had first learned rules aligned with their own tastes had a harder time adjusting to the change, the analysis found.
By contrast, people who encountered rules at odds with their existing tastes from the start, such as low points for foods they preferred, picked up the new rules relatively easily even after the conditions changed. The team concluded that a first experience can shape the learning that follows.
Adding Healthy Food to a Diet May Be Easier
Learning patterns also differed by type of food. Participants accepted assigning new value to foods they disliked more readily than turning the value of foods they had long enjoyed negative.
The researchers said the findings offer lessons worth considering when putting together a weight-loss diet. Rather than cutting out favorite foods outright, adding healthy foods one has not preferred to the diet may carry relatively less burden.
"Let's say you don't really like broccoli. It may be easier to include broccoli in your diet than to give up ice cream," Rich said.
"Existing preferences for food are very strong and hard to change," Levy said, adding that "even small changes have the potential to make a big difference."
Succeeding at weight loss depends less on forcing yourself to go without foods you love than on building eating habits you can sustain by working healthy foods naturally into your diet, according to the advice. The experiment had limits, however: participants did not actually eat the foods, and the study did not involve changing diets over a long period.
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