Fighting the Temptation to Eat Junk Food Through Emotions

A new study claimed that people can fight the temptation to eat unhealthy food items through their emotions, ABC reported.

According to the researchers who conducted the study, people can avoid eating junk foods by removing the positive feelings they have associated with them.

For the study, the researchers presented almost 200 test participants with different varieties of junk food.

The volunteers were then asked to rate the items based on how tempted they are to eat them using a scale from one to seven. Aside from the rating system, the participants were also asked to describe the junk foods using positive and negative words.

After rating and describing the unhealthy snacks, the participants were allowed to eat them.

Based on the researchers' observations, the food items that received low ratings and were described using negative words were not eaten as much by the participants as compared to those that were rated and labeled positively.

According to Ashley Haynes, the study's co-author and an applied cognitive psychology PhD student at Australia's Flinders University, the findings strongly suggest that people can resist eating junk foods as long as they are associated with negative thoughts.

"The more negative implicit evaluation of food, the less tempted people felt and the less of the food they ate," she told ABC.

"Instead of associating unhealthy foods with positive concepts, we can associate them with more negative concepts in an attempt to reduce the strength of temptation experienced and therefore more successfully minimize snack food consumption," Haynes added.

For Peter Lovibond, a psychology professor at the University of New South Wales and a non-member of the research team, simply trying to change people's perception on junk foods is not an easy task and may not be a successful way to correct eating habits.

There are other strategies that should be employed such as urging advertising companies to change how junk foods are depicted.

The findings of Haynes and her research team were detailed in a report published by Psychology and Health, an online site that features academic reports on people's mental and physical health conditions.