How To Get Your Brain To Crave Healthy Foods: New Weight Loss Program Thinks They've Figured It Out

We have all heard the old age belief that your body literally craves all the things that are bad for you, but now a new study shows that it may finally be possible to stop your brain from craving junk food. Research has shown that eating too much salt, sugar, cheese and other items within the junk food variety is the same as any other addiction.

A report from Today states that after multiple years and perhaps even a lifetime of eating high-caloric and high-processed foods, like any addict, the brain changes, causing your body and senses to crave foods that are nutritionally poor for you. Scientists always believed that due to our seemingly engrained eating habits, our brain was changed permanently, but now a new study reveals that after 6-months of healthy eating, it may be possible to alter your cravings—for good.

“Most of America has problems controlling their food,” says Susan Roberts, senior scientist at the USDA Human Nutrition Reserach Center on Aging at Tufts University. Tufts researchers decided to sift through these former health reports and determine if participants who are in the process of dieting with a weight-loss program developed by Roberts herself still craved junk food. In order to determine this, the Tufts researchers selected 13 obese adults, 8 who dieted and 5 who continued to eat regularly.

Then the group underwent fMRI scans at the beginning of the study and another fMRI scan six months later. While undergoing the scans, the participants were shown photos of both healthy and unhealthy foods, and then researchers examined the blood-flow of the brain’s specific reward center. The results were staggering, peoples brain’s had actually changed.

In the first fMRI, the dieters’ brain sparked when viewing images of high-caloric foods, however after 6-monts of healthy eating, the reward center changed and demonstrated excitement when they saw low-calorie and healthy food. After six-months of healthy eating, the brain’s circuitry had changed. “The MRI is just a metabolic demonstration of what people have been telling us,” Roberts says.