Hunger shifts attention towards less healthy food options, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Hunger shifts attention towards less healthy food options, study finds

medicalxpress.com

67 pointsPaulHoule19 comments

What this makes me wonder is whether hunger would also affect other "gut" decisions by biasing towards direct sensory perceptual features and away from "cognitive" features. This would be sort of like the stuff about how judges allegedly handed down harsher sentences just before lunch. But you could imagine similar stuff on other judgment tasks where bias of various kinds can exist, like "how friendly is this person" or "which of these places would you like to go to?"

Looking at food and evaluating it for how good it is to eat is something we humans have evolved to do over thousands of years. Things like "NutriScores" have only existed for a few decades, and the details of them continue to vary from place to place and on a small timescale, so even people who are exposed to them can't always interpret them. This study can be interpreted as saying that we're more likely to use "primal" means to solve "primal" needs (e.g., use visual attributes of food to solve a need for food), and de-emphasize complex, culturally-derived tools like writing and numbers. It would be interesting to know how general that tendency is.

I also enjoyed that the photo is of a person eating a hamburger and the study was done on students at the University of Hamburg.

> What this makes me wonder is whether hunger would also affect other "gut" decisions by biasing towards direct sensory perceptual features and away from "cognitive" features. This would be sort of like the stuff about how judges allegedly handed down harsher sentences just before lunch. But you could imagine similar stuff on other judgment tasks where bias of various kinds can exist, like "how friendly is this person" or "which of these places would you like to go to?"

Intuitively, it makes sense to me that it would. I definitely lose some impulse control and my pattern of thinking changes the hungrier I am. Someone that I know with both diabetes and anxiety has also spoken previously about how when their blood sugar levels get lower, certain aspects of their anxiety are also reduced, such as the decision paralysis or over-analyzing of choices that they are otherwise prone to.

It would be interesting to see a study of how other primal needs affect food choices and more general decision making as well, and whether it's the same mechanism as with hunger. For example, sleep deprivation.

> I also enjoyed that the photo is of a person eating a hamburger and the study was done on students at the University of Hamburg.

This was pretty cute. A nice little bit of whimsy.

From my anecdotal experience, being grumpy when hungry I would say definitely. :)

But it's not just me for sure.

A well-known study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2011 found that judges' decisions can be influenced by extraneous factors such as the time of day. Specifically, the study observed that judges were more likely to grant parole at the beginning of the day or after a meal break, with favorable rulings decreasing as the session progressed.

This pattern suggests that factors unrelated to the legal merits of a case, like mental fatigue or hunger, can affect judicial decision-making.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1018033108

This is something I think is absolutely human as it is outrageous.

I have always found this response to the hungry judges study much more compelling than the study itself:

http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-j...

> […] I want to take a different approach in this blog. I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism.

> If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal.

The lunch break literally a thing that exists because society is organized around hunger a food a lot.

People being somewhat harsher or less focused does not imply everything should stop. That is massive exaggeration. What happens is that organizations have lunch breaks and people have snacks so that effect is not too large.

I don’t understand the possible solution this article describes. Educating people is trumped by the fact hunger exacerbates unhealthy eating. So not having people in a vulnerable, very hungry state is key to having them consider healthy options.

This has been my experience when using Zepbound, one of the new-ish weight loss drugs. Since I am not hungry all the time or having strong cravings, I think much more carefully about what I eat and how much. “I can only eat this much, so I better eat something with protein/fiber.” Before I would not feel sated until I gave into a craving.

Downside though is that sometimes I end up “wanting to want.” Like, having a date night with the wife, social gatherings with food, or just the occasional indulgence.

You could learn to manage your blood sugar.

I liked the book "the glucose revolution" which describes how blood sugar affects you, and some hacks to manage it.

If your blood sugar spikes, it will eventually crash, making you tired, irritable, think unclearly and have strong cravings.

If you manage your blood sugar to even it out, you'll have even energy levels, clear thinking and won't be hungry.

there were a few easy ways to do this. Walking 10 minutes after eating. Switching the order of food in a meal to start out with fiber, add protein and fat and eat carbs towards the end. not eating carbs alone. lots of other things.

EDIT: random summary:

https://wisewords.blog/book-summaries/glucose-revolution-boo...

For starters, awareness of not letting yourself get so hungry in the first place before eating something? Tons of people in my own life push off eating until they're starving and then just grab the most convenient option. They aren't in an economically vulnerable position, It's self inflicted.

Another effect I notice consistently in myself is I will eat more, and less healthy, if I haven't slept enough.

Sure, research indicates that's a common behavior. It's one of the reasons why poor sleep seems to cause obesity (along with endocrine system impacts and other factors).

Personally, hunger shifts my attention away from “junk” food (like pizza and chips) and low-calorie “healthy” food (salads) to high-calorie “healthy” food, like nut butter and greek yogurt or fatty meat. But maybe this is affected by conscious bias, since most people online say protein is the most satiating.

I call this intuitive eating.

You're hungry and you feel like carrot sticks with, say, a honey-soy-sauce-tahini based dip, maybe some beetroot hummus <- that's intuitive eating. OR whatever wholesome foods one may prefer at any given time.

You're hungry and you feel like a chocolate bat <- somethings probably misaligned.

Regarding satiation, I tend not to agree with the idea that we're all different. There's eight billion of us, we must have something in common. Having said that, different people are going to find different ratios of the macronutrients more or less satisfying at different times, both proximal and through the human lifecycle.

In the case of an actual hunger and lack of calories, carrots are mostly useless while chocolate bar provides those.

Even better would be complex sacharids and full meal ... but intuitive eating does not imply you will never each chocolate or sugar. It does not mean you will eat like person with an eating disorder either.

Also found by the study: people choose the food with the highest expected caloric content when hungry (actually the #1 correlate, ahead of expected tastiness), which seems unsurprising. The paper doesn't seem to have any way of dealing systematically with obvious correlations (or anti-correlations) of perceptions of tastiness, healthiness, and expected caloric content, or the obvious theory that people tend to choose the food that they think has the highest caloric content when they are hungry. The entire paper seems statistically perilous.

I thought we knew this already. The age old advice is to not grocery shop while hungry because you'll buy junk food. It's also why free lunch in schools correlates with better grades because kids can't focus properly when hungry.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't a genetic basis for this on some level. If you're not well fed you're gonna crave the maximally efficient ways to put calories in your food hole, fats and sugars.

it is better to eat "bad" food, than nothing at all, is an ancient piece of advice, so to see it reflected in a study is not surprising survival=pragmatism in a simplified equation that it is autonomic or instinctive is again ,not surprising it is also my understanding, that low landers who are assigned work and administrative possitions, above the snow line, will in short order be craving the sort of ultra high fat diet that they might find repugnant, in there normal low land environment

The hamburger in the first image looks pretty healthy to me.

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