Why you can’t stop eating junk food

GOOD news! Now you can blame eating unhealthy food on something other than your lack of willpower.

NOW you can blame eating unhealthy food on something other than your willpower. Scientists now say that we are subconsciously drawn to bad foods because we see it as ‘dangerous and attractive’.

It’s the same lure that makes ‘dangerous’ people irresistible — and the more danger we sense, the harder they are to ignore.

A truly dangerous looking burger.

Researchers from Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies studied how people viewed different foods on conscious and unconscious levels.

The study asked that 57 people of normal weight draw a line with a stylus on a tablet as quickly as they could between two dots.

While they did this, there was a food like a banana or a pizza on one side of the first dot, as well as a kitchen appliance like a toaster that acted as a control.

The participants then rated the foods on a number of issues such as how much they liked them and how healthy they were.

The study said: “Food and food-related stimuli are powerful attentional-capturing cues and strong sources of interference with ongoing actions even if irrelevant to the task”.

Images of pizza were used in the test.

It was concluded that the more unhealthy people perceived the food as, the more negatively they felt about it — but the stronger the pull was towards eating it.

Lead researcher Francesco Foroni said that this was because we are “hardwired” to pay attention to dangerous things.

He added that this gives us an indication as to why so many diets are doomed from the start; because human nature dictates that we cannot resist things that we should shun the most.

Originally published as Why you can’t stop eating junk food