There is limited research on how taxes and subsidies would influence the energy and nutritional quality of food purchases. Using an experimental analogue purchasing task, we examined the effects of increasing the price of high-calorie-for-nutrient foods or reducing the price of low-calorie-for-nutrient foods by 12.5% and 25% on mothers' purchases of 68 common foods and drinks. Taxing less healt...

OBJECTIVE The difficulty for chronic dieters (i.e. restrained eaters) in regulating their food intake is a conflict between two apparently incompatible goals: eating enjoyment and weight control. The latter goal consistently relies on the deployment of cognitive resources, and very often on a significant amount of self-control. This study investigated whether self-affirmation might counteract t...

The abundant exposure to food cues in our environment is one of the main drivers of overconsumption. Food evaluation is important for the regulation of food intake by the brain and it's interaction with hunger state. Children are especially susceptible to food cues. Understanding the mechanisms behind this regulation in healthy individuals across the life span can help to elucidate the mechanis...

Much attention has been paid to the behavioral characteristics of successful weight loss maintenance, but less is known about the cognitive processes that underlie this process. The purpose of this study was to investigate cognitive interference from food-related cues in long-term weight loss maintainers (WLM; N = 15) as compared with normal weight (NW; N = 19) and obese (OB; N = 14) controls. ...

Two studies explored Americans' tendency to simplify nutrition information. Substantial minorities of separate samples of college students, physical plant workers, and a national sample considered a variety of substances, including some essential nutrients (salt and fat), to be harmful at trace levels. Almost half the respondents believed that high-calorie foods in small amounts contain more ca...

Reductions in reward-related (e.g. striatal) neural activation have been noted following obesity surgery. It has been speculated that these postoperative neural changes may be related to documented postoperative changes in food preferences; however, this relation has not been previously established. In this study, functional magnetic resonance imaging and rating scales were used to assess neura...

OBJECTIVE Previous studies have shown that estimations of the calorie content of an unhealthy main meal food tend to be lower when the food is shown alongside a healthy item (e.g. fruit or vegetables) than when shown alone. This effect has been called the negative calorie illusion and has been attributed to averaging the unhealthy (vice) and healthy (virtue) foods leading to increased perceived...

The idea of "negative-calorie" food stems from the notion that the body uses more energy to chew and digest certain foods than the food itself contains, thereby creating a net deficit in caloric intake. Some foods commonly thought to have this effect include celery, cucumbers, and cold water. However, that doesn't mean that eating these foods should be substituted for your daily workout. The am...