{"id":1003,"date":"2014-04-17T11:52:04","date_gmt":"2014-04-17T15:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2014-05-18T12:10:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-18T16:10:51","slug":"chocoholic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2014\/04\/17\/chocoholic\/","title":{"rendered":"Chocoholic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Brown_Chocolate\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cChocoholic\u201d \u2013 that was my nickname as a kid, and it was an appropriate one since chocolate was the only form of dessert I ate. I can attest to the fact that there is no sweet comfort food quite like chocolate. Seriously though, think of how often you have heard your friends or people in general state something along the lines of \u201cI\u2019m craving something sweet right now,\u201d and they end up eating chocolate, or how many times they express that they \u201cneed a piece of chocolate!\u201d We frequently feel these cravings in everyday life and normally do not question them, but do you ever wonder whether there is another reason or force pushing you to crave food, especially sweets and if so, how do you get it to disappear? The answer can actually be you, as demonstrated in the Werthmann et al. study \u201cAttention Bias for Chocolate Increases Chocolate Consumption \u2013 An Attention Bias Modification Study.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this experiment, the researchers wanted to discover whether attending to food increases your craving for it. They gathered 56 undergraduate females to participate in the study. They only allowed females to participate because in general, they tend to have eating patterns that differ from males. The researchers focused the study specifically on chocolate cravings \u2013 the most common sweet that women yearn for! Half the women were shown pictures of chocolate, while the other half saw pictures of shoes, which is obviously another item females are known to love.<\/p>\n

Imagine yourself as a participant in the study being shown either images of chocolate or shoes. Naturally, the appearance of these items captures your attention as a reflexive response to their presence and causes you to automatically look at the image. Some of the individuals in the study are told to focus on the picture when it pops up on the screen \u2013 this is the natural, inherent eye movement, called a saccadic eye movement. The rest of you are told to look elsewhere when the image is presented. In order to successfully do this, you need to suppress the reflexive response to look at the picture and force yourself to attend to something else. This is called an anti-saccadic eye movement because you are going against your natural reaction to look at the item when it appears.<\/p>\n

After the researchers show you the images, they tell you that they hid two chocolates in the room for you to search for. After seven minutes they make you stop looking for the chocolate, if you were still searching, and revealed that they actually only hid one chocolate! They recorded each one of your search times for the second chocolate in order to determine how motivated you were to find it. To compensate for the deception, you are given a bowl of chocolate and can take as much as you want! However, the researchers had ulterior motives and actually recorded the weight of the bowl before and after you took the chocolate, using the weight difference as a measurement of chocolate intake in grams. Next, they have you answer a questionnaire that focuses on how hungry you are and how much you are craving food in general, rather than specifically chocolate.<\/p>\n

As expected, the participants who were shown pictures of chocolate and were told to look at the images as they came up on the screen ate more chocolate than the participants who attended to images of shoes. What is interesting though, is that the group of participants that were shown pictures of chocolate, but instructed to resist looking at the image as it appeared, had the highest amount of chocolate consumption. The results show that concentrating on chocolate at all increases the consumption and craving of it, but they also suggest that resisting the natural response to attend to chocolate increases the desire to eat it even more. This is obviously interesting, but what does it mean? To me, it means think before you diet!<\/p>\n

How many times do you hear about crazy diets where people only drink liquids for a week or do not eat anything with carbohydrates? Currently, these types of eating restrictions drown the United States population, especially the female population. The popularity of these diets coincides with the surge to eat healthier, organic foods and the increase in production of gluten free and lactose free items. I whole-heartedly support eating healthy, unprocessed food, yet I cannot help but question whether cutting entire food groups or items out of one\u2019s diet without a medical reason is actually beneficial. This study only increased my inclination that it is not! As the results show, consciously resisting a food item can actually cause you to eat more of it when you are able to. Therefore, do not follow a diet that tells you to cut out specific types of food because this tends to backfire, making all of the time spent resisting that item a waste. Instead, the results support diets that have you eat small portions of less healthy foods or in this case, have you consume one piece of chocolate a day. This eating style fulfills your craving, but regulates how much of that specific food you consume.<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

National Geographic. (2011, August 11, 2011). Incredible SNAPs: Digital dream maker. Message posted to http:\/\/www.incrediblesnaps.com\/collection-of-yummy-chocolates<\/p>\n

Werthmann, J., Field, M., Roefs, A., Nederkoorn, C., & Jansen, A. (2014). Attention bias for chocolate increases chocolate consumption\u2014An attention bias modification study. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 45(1), 136-143. doi:10.1016\/j.jbtep.2013.09.009<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cChocoholic\u201d \u2013 that was my nickname as a kid, and it was an appropriate one since chocolate was the only form of dessert I ate. I can attest to the fact that there is no sweet comfort food quite like chocolate. Seriously though, think of how often you have heard your friends or people in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4798,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216,130416],"tags":[7681],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4798"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1513,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions\/1513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}