4Health Blog: Imagine swallowed to decrease food lack States (CME / CE) (MedPageToday)

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Repeatedly pretending to eat a specific food -- really smelling, tasting, chewing, and swallowing it -- may actually decrease the desire for that delicacy, researchers say.

Patients who imagined eating 30 M&M's subsequently munched significantly fewer of the candies than those who didn't think about downing them or thought about nibbling only a few, Carey Morewedge, PhD, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and colleagues reported in Science.

Much research in psychology suggests that thinking about something actually increases the desire for that object -- imagining a piece of chocolate or a steak dinner, for instance, causes salivation and increases cravings, depending on taste, of course.

But Morewedge and colleagues took that finding further by asking what happens when patients follow through on imagining that they're physically ingesting these foods. Since data from MRI scans have shown that similar brain regions are activated for the tasks of perception and imagination, they hypothesized that they'd instead observe the same outcomes for pretending to do something and actually doing it.

"There's tons of literature in psychology that says [our idea] was wrong," co-author Joachim Vosgerau, PhD, also of Carnegie Mellon, told MedPage Today. "But we ran the experiment and we were totally stunned."

The researchers actually ran a series of five experiments to confirm their findings. In the first, 51 patients were asked to imagine one of three scenarios: inserting three quarters into a laundry machine and eating 30 M&M's, flipping the situation to insert 30 quarters and eat only three M&M's, or just put 33 quarters in the machine.

Participants were then allowed to actually eat from a bowl of M&M's under the premise that they were preparing for a taste test. The researchers weighed the weight of the bowl to determine how much of the candy was missing.

They found that those who imagined eating 30 M&M's ate significantly less than those who pretended to eat just three of the candies or put quarters in a laundry machine (P<0.05).

The amount eaten by those in the latter two groups didn't differ significantly, "so the imagination induction didn't sensitize participants to the food," they wrote. "Rather, repeatedly imagining the consumption of a food habituated participants to the food."

They conducted a second study to confirm that the findings weren't due to the control task, and the next three experiments tested whether habituation -- building a "tolerance" to the food by pretending to eat -- was responsible for the diminished appetites.

"Is it really about imagining eating them, or is it just about imagining those M&M's," Vosgereau said. "That's important because if imagination and experience are close together, the effect should only occur if [patients] imagine that they're eating."

In one of these experiments, the researchers found that the effect didn't occur when patients merely imagined putting M&M's into a bowl.

Vosgereau also said it was important to show that the effect was stimulus-specific. Eating steak, for instance, eventually decreases desire for it, "but that won't influence our desire to eat ice cream," he said.

So patients were asked to imagine eating M&M's or cheese cubes, and then were given a bowl of cheddar cubes to eat from.

Again, the researchers found that those who pictured eating 30 cubes consumed less cheese than those who imagined eating just three cubes (P<0.05). There was no difference in the amount of cubes consumed for those who imagined eating any amount of M&M's.

While Vosgereau doesn't expect the technique to be of any help in the current obesity epidemic, as it won't generally curb hunger, he said it will probably help patients "dampen the craving for a particular food."

He added that he's actually using the technique in his own attempt at smoking cessation. While much of the battle is typically suppressing thoughts and cravings, Vosgereau instead pretends to indulge.

"You have to imagine smoking drag by drag," he says. "It takes about eight minutes."

The researchers reported no conflicts of interest.

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