A small study using brain scans suggests the addictive power of unhealthy, high-calorie food can be reduced and the brain retrained to prefer healthy, lower calorie foods. Participants who followed a 6-month behavioral weight-loss program showed significant changes in the way the reward centers in their brains responded to the two types of food.
The study team, including researchers from Harvard Medical School and Tufts University, both in Boston, MA, reports the findings in the journal Nutrition & Diabetes.
There is strong evidence to suggest individuals can retrain the brain to focus on healthy eating with early rewards. The scan results showed that compared to the controls, the group that followed the weight-loss program showed increased reward center activity in response to seeing images of low-calorie foods at the end of the program, and decreased activity in response to high-calorie foods.
Consider the First Source!
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word choreographed an assembly of amino acids into an exquisite array of specific proteins. Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” In so doing God demonstrated a penchant for genomic writing, preceeded by an amazing series of prebiotic events, in a highly orchestrated presentation of evolutionary overcontrol.
