In a previous study, restrained eaters showed stronger implicit preferences for high-caloric food compared to unrestrained eaters. Caloric density and palatability are however almost always intertwined, and it was never tested whether this high-calorie food preference of restrained eaters follows from the energy density or the palatability of high-calorie foods. Here, it was examined whether re...

We are all well aware that rising levels of obesity in developed countries is having a significant impact on the health of the population. This is despite the availability of a wide range of low-calorie foods and an awareness of how important it is to adopt a healthy lifestyle. A new and emerging approach is to design foods that enhance the physiological regulatory mechanisms controlling appeti...

Recently, several sets of standardized food pictures have been created, supplying both food images and their subjective evaluations. However, to date only the OLAF (Open Library of Affective Foods), a set of food images and ratings we developed in adolescents, has the specific purpose of studying emotions toward food. Moreover, some researchers have argued that food evaluations are not valid ac...

Human desire for sweet taste spans all ages, races, and cultures. Throughout evolution, sweetness has had a role in human nutrition, helping to orient feeding behavior toward foods providing both energy and essential nutrients. Infants and young children in particular base many of their food choices on familiarity and sweet taste. The low cost and ready availability of energy-containing sweeten...

Children and adolescents in the United States and in many countries are projected to have shorter life spans than their parents, partly because of the obesity crisis engulfing the developed world. Exposure to electronic media is often implicated in this crisis because media use, including electronic game play, may promote sedentary behavior and increase consumption of high-calorie foods and bev...

BACKGROUND Neuronal processes that underlie the subjective experience of satiety after a meal are not well defined. OBJECTIVE We investigated how satiety alters the perception of and neural response to visual food cues. DESIGN Normal-weight participants (10 men, 13 women) underwent 2 fMRI scans while viewing images of high-calorie food that was previously rated as incompatible with weight l...

We are continuously exposed to food and during the day we make many food choices. These choices play an important role in the regulation of food intake and thereby in weight management. Therefore, it is important to obtain more insight into the mechanisms that underlie these choices. While several food choice functional MRI (fMRI) studies have been conducted, the effect of energy content on neu...

Background/Objectives: Previous studies suggest that non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) applied to the prefrontal cortex modulates food choices and calorie intake in obese humans. Participants/Methods: In the present fully randomized, placebo-controlled, within-subject and double-blinded study, we applied single sessions of anodal, cathodal, and sham tDCS to the left do...

Strong cravings for unhealthy foods and implicit tendencies to approach them threaten the physical mental health of vulnerable populations. Yet, measures food have methodological limitations, as existing approach-avoidance tasks (AAT) are often unreliable require specialized hardware. We propose a novel method measure biases: on touchscreen, participants slide their hand either toward item (and...

INTRODUCTION Approximately 60% of the American diet comes from processed foods, which makes improving their nutritional quality important for Americans' health. The objective of this study was to measure changes in serving sizes, calories, and sodium in top-selling processed foods that were on the market in 2009 and 2015. METHODS We analyzed products in the top 80% of sales in the 54 processe...