Notes for James Clear’s post: What Happens to Your Brain When You Eat Junk Food:
Conventional reasons not to eat junk food.
- Heart problems / high blood pressure
- Linked to depression
- Obesity
Food factors that overcome those known cons.
Summarizes Steven Witherly’s work (a food scientist) on why we like certain foods.
- Sensation of eating the food. How well are the taste qualities stimulated, the smell of the food, as well as the texture.
- Nutrient composition of the food. Combinations of salt / sugar / fat.
Engineering food.
-
Evoking multiple different sensations with the food. For example, french fries, are crunchy at first, but then make a paste-like texture before ingestion.
-
Salivary gland stimulation. Foods that cause saliva to be released are more effective in delivering active tastants to the taste buds of the oral cavity.
- Fast removal of oral stimulation. If you can clear food signals, the brain can be tricked to believing it has not consumed enough food. Cheetos are a good example:
“It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”
-
Avoiding sensory desensitization. Prolonged exposure to a ligand, or mechanical stimulation can desensitize receptors and hence your ability to report the presence of that ligand. Junk food is designed to prevent this.
-
Calorie density. Junk food has an optimal energy density to prevent the brain from feeling sated.
- Reliable conditioning stimuli. The smell, or sight of a familiar food will activate the memories of prior taste experiences. Advertising, the packaging, and the smells can all re-evoke your memories.
Steps to avoid junk food.
-
Environmental programming. You can’t eat what you don’t stock in your refrigerator. Avoid junk food in groceries, which tend to be in the middle of the grocery.
-
Choose variety for meals. You can perform the same multi-stimulation trick by choosing several healthy foods for a meal.
-
Stress may reduce your willpower to eat healthy food. Acknowledge this and try to find other means to cope with stress.