As you glance over a menu or peruse the shelves in a supermarket, your brain is making decisions based on a food's caloric content, according to a new study.
An internal calorie counter of sorts in the brain evaluates each food based on its caloric density, researchers said.
Scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre studied brain scans of healthy participants who were asked to examine pictures of various foods.
Participants rated which foods they would like to consume and were asked to estimate the calorie content of each food.
They were poor at accurately judging the number of calories in the various foods, but their choices and their willingness to pay still centered on those foods with higher caloric content.
"Earlier studies found that children and adults tend to choose high-calorie food," said Dr Alain Dagher, neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital and lead author of the study.
"The easy availability and low cost of high-calorie food has been blamed for the rise in obesity. Their consumption is largely governed by the anticipated effects of these foods, which are likely learned through experience.
"Our study sought to determine how people's awareness of caloric content influenced the brain areas known to be implicated in evaluating food options. We found that brain activity tracked the true caloric content of foods," Dagher said.
Decisions about food consumption and caloric density are linked to a part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area that encodes the value of stimuli and predicts immediate consumption.
Understanding the reasons for people's food choices could help to control the factors that lead to obesity, researchers said.
The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.
