Food for Thought
Posted by News Editor
Tuesday, August 09, 2005

There has been some interesting research about aversion therapy can help control over eating.  What you may ask has this to do with false allegations?  

This new approach to gluttony is based on the principle that by implanting false memories in the brains of compulsive eaters, they become convinced that in childhood they had become averse to certain foods. The theory is that this will help them to follow a better diet with less fattening foods.

Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California, explains that it is well known that food preferences and aversions acquired in childhood are likely to be lifelong. To demonstrate this, Loftus was, in one experiment, able to persuade volunteer students that eating strawberry ice-cream when children had made them very sick, and that thereafter they had an aversion to this delicacy.

So clear was the students’ false memory of disaster that had followed an excessive intake of strawberry ice-cream as children that in time they embellished Loftus’s implanted false memory and improved on it. When the students whom she had treated were later tested for food preferences, the students who had been successfully implanted with a false memory no longer enjoyed strawberry ice-cream — and avoided eating it .

Which goes to prove just how easy it is to not only implant false information but also false experiences.