The power of suggestion won another brownie point when researchers from University of California-Irvine, University of Washington and Kwantlen University College in Washington, found that implanting unpleasant memories of calorie-laden foods helps people lose weight by avoiding these foods without any special efforts.
Under the experiment, researchers convinced around 200 volunteers, oblivious of the goal of the study, that they did not like certain kinds of food in their childhood because they became sick when they ate those foods.
“You gather data from the subject. It just so happens that these were data about personality and childhood experiences about food. You tell them you fed the data into a very smart computer and it comes out with profile about childhood experiences with food. Then you add in you got sick on strawberry ice cream. You want them to think about the getting sick aspect of the experience,” said Elizabeth Loftus, the lead author of the study, explaining the concept of what the researchers called the false feedback technique.
Around 47 volunteers were told they got sick when they ate strawberry ice cream in childhood. Almost 40 per cent of this group believed the claim instead of searching their memories for the truth. These volunteers were found to have started disliking strawberry ice cream when they were made to fill a questionnaire at a later date. Another group wasn’t given any such indication and reported no difference in its preference for foods. The power of suggestion, however, failed in the case of chocolate chip cookies and potato chips.
“We believe this new finding may have significant implications for dieting,” Loftus said.
The researchers also managed to convince some subjects that they liked eating certain healthy foods. “The flip side of this is we convince them they had a really positive experience with asparagus,” she added.
But before this method of weight loss is tried, more research is necessary to see if the suggestion has long-term implications. “A few things would need to be ironed out before you could take this out to the real world. You would have to show that the effects are longer lasting than just an hour,” Loftus cautioned, adding, “Then you would also like to show that this would work when real foods are put in front of you.”
Other diet experts are also not too sure if such a method could be effectively used in practical application. UCLA's School of Medicine psychiatry professor Michael Strober said that physical inactivity and convenience foods were to blame to growing obesity. “Such systemic lifestyle issues need to be targeted by something far more comprehensive than implanting false memories,” he said, commenting on the study. American Psychological Association’s Stephen Behnke said tampering with people’s memories ‘raises profound ethical questions’. “Say, for example, we could change a person's belief about their entire childhood. Would doing so be ethical?” he asked.
However, Loftus felt that the method might help parents inculcate good eating habits in their children. “People kind of cringe at the idea that anyone would suggest that they lie to their children, but they do it all the time when they tell them Santa Claus exists and so does the tooth fairy,” she contended.
The findings of the study have been published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
