Shine OnCrying over a tub of Ben and Jerry’s? Strong emotions decrease our ability to taste fat
Ever wonder why it's so easy to consume the entire pint of ice cream after a breakup? It might be because feeling blue decreases about ability to gauge how much fat we're eating.
A new study by researchers out of Germany's University of Wurzburg, claims that strong emotions can significantly decrease our ability to taste or perceive the amount of fat in foods.
Their findings were published in the journal PLOS One.
Forty-eight women and 32 men, all of whom were feeling "a little blue or anxious" as assessed by the Beck Depression Inventory, were shown emotional videos with both happy and sad story lines — a father watches his son die in one, a man brought flowers to a woman in another — and then given samples of a creamy drink containing varying levels of fat.
Researchers found that the participants' sensitivities to bitter, sweet and sour tastes were heightened by about 15 per cent after watching the emotional videos.
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Their finding were consistent with previous observations.
"So, there's an observation that other people have made, that people who tend to be anxious or people who are depressed clinically, when you ask them how they perceive various tastes in the mouth – bitter, sweet, sour, salt, they tend to rate them higher," study co-author Paul Breslin of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers University tells The Naked Scientists.
The study participants' ability to distinguish between high and low levels of fat, however, "got much worse" after watching the emotional-response-triggering videos.
"It was a surprise," Breslin says of the results of the study.
When the participants were shown a boring, unemotional workplace video, they didn't lose their ability to gauge levels of fat, The Salt reports.
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"We believe that our data on sweet, sour and bitter tastes support prior observations of a relationship between subclinical depression and anxiety and taste thresholds...Whereas a decrease in the ability of slightly subclinically depressed subjects to rate fat concentrations accurately when in negative or positive mood has not previously been reported," the researchers conclude.
Breslin says these findings align with other research that suggests that mildly depressed individuals who struggle with their weight may have lower sensitivity to fat.
"We were experimentally manipulating the system and really sort of showing that what those observations that had been made in the past were really making sense. And what it suggests is, that perhaps people who tends to be heavier, have a higher body mass, tend to be slightly more depressed or have more negative affect," Breslin tells The Naked Scientists.
It's possible, he tells The Salt, that if "they don't know the fat is there, and eat it, they may be inadvertently eating more fat. That's sort of the concern here."
