How to Rewire Your Brain to Love Healthy Foods and Ditch Junk

We will touch on new science about Socially Transmitted Food Preferences.

Wouldn’t you love to be able to change your food preferences?

Okay… we will got to this, but first a special announcement about a new initiative: Putting the Metabolism Back in Medicine with the Next Generation!

A Quick Special Announcement

It’s no secret that conventional medicine overlooks and undervalues “Metabolic Medicine.” We need to change that!

I’m now teaming up with the Medical School MCAT prep company, ExamKrackers to help Put the Metabolism Back in Medicine! (See 8:53 in “Sugar Babies” Video. Click HERE.)

Specifically, ExamKrackers and I are teaming up to provide pre-med students preparing for the MCAT entrance exam to medical school with FREE MCAT-style passages based on papers covered in my videos.

This way, pre-med students can learn about nutrition and metabolism while preparing for their MCAT!

• Passages are written based on New Metabolism Research in Top Journals, like Cell Metabolism, Science and Nature.

• Every passage is accompanied by a video.

• The FREE MCAT passages are available to anyone, even those not applying to medical school. So, if you just want to test your “pre-med muscles” for fun, go for it!

• For those who find value in the passages, we will provide discount codes to more comprehensive preparatory materials.

• Our core team of two question writers both scored 524 (100th percentile) on their MCATs. We know what we’re doing!

Fact: Only 1 in 10 Americans is metabolically healthy and rates of chronic metabolic disease are increasing, despite our exorbitant healthcare costs ($4.5 Trillion/yr). We need another solution.

We need to make Metabolic Health Mainstream. Hopefully, the next generation of doctors can help!

Now, your Newsletter feature presentation :)…

Wouldn’t you love to be able to change your food preferences?

Okay, hang with for a quick thought puzzle: imagine your favorite unhealthy food. Maybe it’s French fries, Pizza, Ice cream, whatever. Hold that temptation in your mind.

Now imagine a healthy food you don’t enjoy nearly as much. Maybe salmon? Eggs? Brussels’s sprouts? Liver? Whatever.

Now, what if you could rewire your brain to like the unhealthy food less and the healthy food more?

Well, you can – at least to some extent. And we’re beginning to understand the neural circuits that explain how.

This video was inspired by new research in Nature that shows how a newly defined circuit in the emotional brain helps to cement socially transmitted food preferences.

Really importantly – and now I’m quote paraphrasing right from the paper:

“Socially transmitted food preferences override innate food preferences.”

This paper is packed with fascinating data, but it’s very technical…

(told you)

Therefore, I’m going to do a very brief review of the experimental approach, and then provide you what I hope will be practical information that you can use in your life.

Basically, what they did was take mice that are known to have an innate preference for a given flavor, Cocoa over cinnamon, and then expose those mice to another mouse that was forced to have cinnamon while the Cocoa-loving mouse observed.

What results is a swap in preference from Cocoa to cinnamon; thus, the preference for cinnamon over cocoa was transferred via social learning.

I know, I know things are always more complex in humans, and watching your sibling eat Brussels sprouts won’t immediately make them appetizing. But hang in there…

Through a series of genetic, chemical and other manipulations the researchers were able to identify the key region in the brain that was responsible for the social transference of food preference: the posteromedial nucleus of the cortical amygdala.

And by manipulating this region and/or the circuits in which it’s involved, the researchers could toggle socially learned food preference.

Takeaway

Now, how is this relevant to you?

Well, while mice are simpler than humans, the brain regions involved are quite primordial and relatively conserved. We humans have amygdala and limbic systems, and they drive much of our behaviors and preferences.

And the broader truth here is one I mentioned at the beginning – socially learned food preference can dominate over innate food preference.

Extrapolating, you’re not “locked in” to liking X junk food and disliking Y healthy food. Those preferences may be largely constructed on social interactions from your past. And, they can be dynamic, with food preference reshaping based on social interactions from your future.

I’m quite serious.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen who dislike a food or – more broadly – a way of eating but then learned to love it after immersing in social settings with others who practiced that way of eating, and who enjoy doing so.

My greatest exposure to this phenomenon has been in the world of low-carbohydrate diets, where one person in a group starts and loves the lifestyle and then members of their social circle learn to love it through exposure.

True – True… There are layers here, and it is likely that there is a “don’t knock it until you try it” phenomenon along with positive associations constructed through positive health results. But in a real-world setting, I don’t see these as competing mechanisms but complementary.

If you seek out and construct social interactions with people who eat the way you want to eat, and even eat and enjoy the foods you want to enjoy… well… I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect your brain may rewire your socially transmitted food preferences to your benefit.