Daily Dose of Diet – Memory
TW says I have to blog about this and since she listened to me and blogged about gnomedex vs blogher, I will take her suggestion. I guess.
Is There a False Food-Memory Diet?
People develop food preferences as children and their food memories often determine their choices as adults. Well ummm, yea, that’s why the phrase comfort food actually means something to most people, right? This part of the study makes sense. What doesn’t make sense to me as what kind of students are these that would look at fake survey results, surveys they filled out, and not realize something was wonky here? I don’t think I could adopt a memory as my own based on a survey result paper handed back to me from some grad student or something. I’d need my mother to tell me some long drawn out story about my strawberry ice cream illness (would you like me to tell you about canned Franco American Macaroni & Cheese, cause that’s a memory I’ve got about food and illness…).
I am just not buying it that these students didn’t choose ice cream on the follow up simply because they decided to believe a piece of paper was true even though they didn’t have a vivid memory or a mom telling them that this was what happened. You notice they still chose chocolate chip cookies, right? Could it be that strawberry ice cream simply isn’t all that popular of a dessert item, especially not next to chocolate chip cookies which probably hold a lot more positive and REAL childhood memories than some fake strawberry ice cream memory?
This study goes further and suggests that students selected asparagus (on a form, they didn’t serve these kids actual food – they’re college students who may be starving and will in reality eat almost anything generally) because they were given fake positive childhood memories. Couldn’t it just be that 20 year olds have grown up and actually had a decently cooked asparagus rather than some floppy and soggy thing from a can that they’d been served in childhood?
I think it probably is possible to give people false childhood food memories over time and/or through hypnosis but by handing them back a fake survey that they supposedly completed themselves? That just makes no sense.
And besides, if this did work, would you really want to trade off 25lbs of fat for the loss of real memories and live your life with false ones? There really are better ways to lose weight, trust me, I know these things.
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