Junk food changes our appetite and appetite for new dishes. This is what suggests a new study published in the American journal Frontiers in Psychology. According to this study, often eating what is called “junk food”, that is to say foods saturated with bad fat, low in nutrients and high in sugars, does not only have an impact on our health. (beware of cardiovascular disease!) But it also has an impact on our palate and our desire to try new dishes.
“Exposure to this Western diet appears to alter the way our brain responds to signals about food,” said study author Prof Margaret Morris of the University of New South Wales.
For this study, two groups of rats were fed different diets for two weeks. One group was fed low fat food and the second had “open bar” to low fat food but also dumplings, cake or cookies. After two weeks of this diet, the rats in the second group were obviously bigger, but also more jaded about food.
“Both humans and animals have a natural preference for novelty,” says Prof Morris. This notion of “specific sensory satiety” is what we all know: if you swallow a plaster of pasta and then you are offered to choose between a steak and pasta, you will choose the steak because you are full and you have. want something different. It is this notion of specific sensory satiety that seems modified when one is on a junk food diet “.
However, the study has so far only looked at rats. Further studies will be needed to find out whether satiety or specific sensory memory are altered in humans as well, and more particularly in obese people.
