Cambridge Scientists Link Some Food Advertising to Obesity

A new study by Cambridge scientists, published in the Journal of Neuroscience (Vol. 26, pp. 5160-5166), found the reward centres of some peoples' brains are more sensitive to appetising food cues. This may help explain compulsive eating disorders and raises questions about claims that food advertising does not affect consumption, merely brand choice..

"The fact that our study used pictures of food has additional pertinence to understanding the current high prevalence of these [compulsive-eating] disorders, because such images are widely used in modern society to promote food selection and intake (eg., advertising, product packaging, vending machines," wrote lead author John Beaver at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in regions of the brain previously linked to responding to food cues ventral striatum, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, ventral pallidum and the midbrain regions. They showed all the volunteers a series of pictures of foods classified as highly appetising like chocolate cake and ice cream sundaes, bland like uncooked rice and potatoes, disgusting like rotten meat and mouldy brean, and non-food objects like a videocassette or an iron.

The volunteers were asked to rate the degree of stimulation to each food stimulus on a scale of one to seven, which indicated the extent the image was disgusting, pleasant, or arousing.

"As predicted, we found that individual differences in trait reward drive [the tendency to pursue the reward] were strongly correlated with activation to pictures of appetising foods in a neural network," wrote Beaver.

The average disgusting rating for appetising food was 1.26, compared to disgusting food, which had a disgusting rating of 4.38. Conversely, the pleasant rating for appetising food was 4.75, while disgusting food had a pleasant rating of 1.46.

"Our study is the first to bridge the gap between these important areas of research, providing insight into the neural mechanisms underlying appetite and the aetiology of eating disorders characterised by excessive intake of food," concluded the researchers.

Given that according to latest statistics from the WHO and the International Obesity Task Force over 300 million adults worldwide are obese, the greater our understanding, the better are our chances of combatting the problem. Perhaps those people who sued a popular fast food corporation were more justified than some realized.

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