Doctor rachel who is a neuroscientist, a leading world expert on the Psychological Sciences and someone who i am very lucky to have as a colleague and friend and in addition to numerous awards and grants for Research Record accumulated over nearly the last 30 years since more than 80 original research articles, multiple scholarly books and several academic and Popular Science books including the college textbook, hello students, in its fifth edition and the sense of desire and that is disgusting unraveling the mysteries of evolution. Shes a thought after a special consultant to various industries regarding smell, taste, food and labor indisputably called upon as an Expert Witness in legal cases involving affection. Students are lucky to work with her and shes an adjunct professor here at brown and the medical school and i love working with her as part of his studies at brown and its a new initiative for research and teaching and projects related to. This evening you are in for quite a treat to hear about her latest fascinating book why you eat what you eat, the Science Behind our relationship with. Please join me in welcoming doctor rachel hurst. [applause] thank you so much. I hope i can live up to that instruction. Thanks for being here. I thought i would give you a little tasting sampler for my book reading various sections to you and after words have a q a and see what happens. Not necessarily in the order that things are written in the book but i will start off with something about taste which is in the beginning and the chapter called the fab four and i will read to you about sweet happiness. It is unsurprising that people with the proverbial sweet to have less control over their ability to resist suites and tend to be somewhat heavier than people with less of a penchant for sugar. That is but extra like the sweet taste is also coupled with extra pressure from eating it. Lovers get more happiness from treats the experience stronger positive mood swings than those who are just onto sugary foods. How much of a suite to view have also determined how much people like you and how nice you are. In an Extensive Research project conducted at north Dakota State University and Gettysburg College in pennsylvania it was found that eating sweets and being sweet were highly correlated. First, it was confirmed that we believe liking suites and being sweet are connected. Strangers are described as looking honey were rated as earlier, more cooperative and more compassionate than the strangers were described as liking grapefruits, lemons, pretzels or hot peppers. That is a bitter, sour, salty and spicy taste. To further experiments show that people who [inaudible] they were more cooperative, kinder and exhibited more altruistic behaviors. They volunteered in Disaster Relief effort completing assisting a stranger. Another that after brief taste of a chocolate compared to a non sweet fruit such as a plain cracker or know it all people felt they became more agreeable to think that it wasnt just talk they also volunteered more of their time to help someone else. This means that a little sugar can give us more sugar pretty decently sweet makes us happier in nicer regardless of how much the sweet tooth we. Sweet taste brings her mood and on the flipside how sweet something taste is affected by the mood you are in. A study conducted at the university of minnesota investigated how stress might change taste perception. On the rest day placements watched a nature film for 30 minutes and on the stress day they underwent 30 minutes of [inaudible] including performing public speech, doing governmental arithmetic problems and submerging a hand in ice water for 90 seconds. On each day following the stress looks. Participants rated the unpleasantness of salty, sour, sweet solutions. Feeling stressed versus wax had no impact on how pleasant the various taste solutions rated to be but on the stress day the taste of sweet, though not salty, sour, was perceived as noticeably weaker. In other words, stress makes sugar taste less sweet. This means that we need more sweetness to get the bang for our buck that we are looking for when we are stressed out. This may cause us to go for extra sweet treats when were frazzled and tense. To sum up tasting a little sugar can make us sweeter but we need to be careful not to overindulge when were not feeling so nice. Now i will move on to a section on the psychological aspects of the things that influence how we consume food and also the consequences of eating and review a section called the milk sake placebo from the chapter mind over monday. Placebo effects in which what we think alters how we feel can be a salvation in emergency situations. A wellknown battlefield for believing agony when Pain Medicine is an supply is to convince porter told her that a pill is morphing when it is nothing but sugar. Amazingly pain almost always subsides. Crisis management a wide range of placebo effects readily occur and its employees are told their jobs with exercise benefits they will lose more weight than their coworkers who are given this information and if people are convinced there is a correlation between athleticism and visual acuity they do better on a vision test after working out. Sleep deprived individuals believe that decaf coffee is fullstrength. It will leave their fatigue and mental fog and runners given a shot of salt water and telling them theyre getting performanceenhancing drugs will run faster and report spending less energy and having a speedier recovery. These are just a few examples. Believing that we will feel healthier, stronger and faster because weve taken the magical pill can produce powerful selfsealing effects. These mind over matter changes are just that. They are distractions, mental control and positive emotional state are all generally within our conscious awareness and that they have consequences on other psychologically driven estate such as energy level in pain perception is not extremely surprising. What would be surprising is the mind could influence what we seem to have no conscious control over such as our metabolism. In a fascinating experience colleagues at yale university. Normal weight, male and female catchments, and the residence for a shake testing study. At one session volunteers evaluated a french pill shake served in a bottle with a label indulgence and the alluring tagline decadence you deserve with smooth, rich delicious on the package. At another session they were given a personal essay called 70 shake tagline tollfree satisfaction and promoted as having 0 fat and added sugar. On both models the nutrition facts were highly visible in the top lines from a calorie content praying in at 624 indulgence but only 144 the other shake. Unbeknownst to the participants the shape was identical in both sessions and truly contained 34. The experiment involved more than just drinking a milkshake. At both sessions which were separated by one week in intravenous catheter was placed in the participants arm so that blood could be drawn for the drink and shake when they first tasted the shake in half an hour after they finished it in order to measure levels. [inaudible] is a hormone secreted by the court when it is empty. It signals the brain that is time to eat and it flows our metabolism so that we burn fewer calories just in case the pantry is bear and would have to carry on hunting for food without sustenance. After a hearty meal the levels drop. This drop also wraps up the metabolism so that we can burn the calories we just just by contrast after eating a garden salad for the dressing the levels dont budge and metabolism to start. In the theory the rise of [inaudible] in occurs in proportion to the calories we consume. In order to achieve a healthy Metabolic Balance between negation between our brain and our metabolism doesnt always follow the theological rules. The study found that when participants strengthen the indulgence shake their levels rose substantially after the first days at 30 minutes later had dropped an astonishing three times more compared to when they drink the other shake. When they drink the lowcalorie shake their levels remained virtually flat broke the entire session and in other words if the participants believed that they were drinking a highcalorie milkshake their body responded as if they had just consumed three times more calories than when they thought they had just downed a lowcalorie shake. Despite the fact that the two shakes were the same in all effects and number of calories they contained was actually moderately high. This means that simply believing that you consumed a whole lot of calories speed up your metabolism. You burn more calories and makes you feel less hungry and this is irrespective of the Actual Energy content of what you have adjusted. The milkshake magician, a leah who is now at Stanford University told National Public radio that labels are just labels but they evoke a set of beliefs and our beliefs matter in virtually every domain in everything we do. The cautionary takehome message is that being obsessed with buying food lowcalorie labels made that fire bicycling our metabolism so that you burn fewer calories than you would if you didnt know how many calories were in that lowfat container of yogurt. The body you need to attend is to convince yourself that what you are eating is a caloric static and even when it isnt in this is a very hard to accomplish labels printed directly on plastic containers and calorie content and low that everywhere you look. The better alternative is to just choose the bowler calorie version of whatever youre buying since the caloric differential usually isnt all that much. For example, half cup of non that vanilla yogurt contains a half at 1000 calories while half a cup of [inaudible] is only 10. Not only will your metabolism not be suppressed but the higher that content will make you feel full for longer. Lowfat also means high sugar. Our minds in the physical environment have a tremendous impact on our experience with food on the consequences of eating both psychological and physiological whether we want them to or not. Now i will move further ahead how the environment can influence our experience of food in our interactions with it and this is about how the shopping environment influences what we buy when were in the grocery and this is a section called byob or bring your own bag in the chapter buying indulgences. Increasingly stores are compelling customers to bring their own shopping bags by either penalty or persuasion. As of 2015 at least 30 us cities have imposed some sort of fan, fee or regulation on the use of thinfilm disposable bags. Elsewhere the practice of bringing your own reusable bag is becoming more psychologically in society rewarded. Many storage encourage this by incentives. Bringing your own Reusable Bags to the Grocery Store is good for the environment but it can also alter your purchasing behavior in ways you may never have imagined. In a groundbreaking collaboration Business School professors from Harvard University and a professor from Duke University conducted an analysis of shoppers behavior large commercial Grocery Stores in california between 2005 and 2007. Using data obtained from Loyalty Cards the researchers were able to ascertain what the shoppers bought and whether the shopper brought their own bag. In total information was collected for 884 households and almost 143,000 shopping trips. The result from this to your study revealed two major findings. First, as might be expected shoppers about their own bags bought more organic products. Second, stunningly byob shoppers put more indulge in foods such as desserts candies and chips on the checkout. Consumers see organic diamonds are likely to care about debarment and therefore are already conscientious about bringing their own backs. This study demonstrates that anyone who is susceptible to buying organic when they bring a reusable bag because buying it primes you to think about the environment. Even if you arent environmentally conscious generally your mind is now has Co Environmental thoughts since organic products are considered to be more environmentally ethical than conventional products into the shopping cart goes organic avocados. Visual cues to change behavior all the time and seafood as [inaudible] is a classic example but the effects can be more subtle. For instance when people see a picture of an exclusive restaurant for eating a snack to eat more neatly and with better table manners than if they were shown a picture of something unrelated. This is what you need to do little kids. Why does the bag encourage you to buy more treats . In this case it isnt so much the site of your bag but rather you feel virtuous because of your bag. This leads to licensing. The film entitled to give yourself a pat on the back because you just done a good deed and benefits to her it comes in the form of tasty calories. Treating yourself to a box of chocolate covered cherries is an easy way to reward yourself not adding to the landfill but the story isnt quite the symbol. They found that bringing her own bag did not always [inaudible] it was not affect all shoppers in the same way. If for Example Store penalize customers to not bring her back they do not buy extra candy bar they were still more likely to purchase organic over conventional egg. Therefore you have to feel that youre being virtuous of your own free will in order to reward yourself with a goodie. Even though having a reasonable bag still finds you towards organic produce. Another observation was that if the shopper had children and therefore was buying groceries for the family there was no difference in the number of organic products or treats they purchased whether they bought their own bags or not. You have to be fine to just be yourself in order for indulgent rewards and green party to the cold. Further medical director was whether the cost of those indulgent treats was made salient. If there was a big sign with the price rewarding yourself was eliminated probably because seeing price tags when youre pulling on your wallet remind you to be thrifty but again this only happens when you bring your own bags freely. The store enforces of byob policy then you buy fewer treats in place for the treat purchases you make are affecting how much they cost. The bottom line is that shop what you bring are more likely to treat the environment and sells well by doing something virtuous may not be as grand as helping the environment but merely doing something beneficial for yourself shifts the reward switch. With the cards of over a thousand shoppers at a large east coast supermarket were tracked with radiofrequency tags that after shopping in the virtuous produce ill and putting kale and grapefruit into their cards customers next stop is most likely the vice sections, the alcohol or ice cream department. In other words we reward our Good Behavior with hedonism and keep a subconscious tally of what we are doing to maintain a balance between our virtues in our places. We are especially assiduous about this when it comes to caloric intake. In a recent study on dieting that follows the progress of 126 people over a sixweek period the more weight they lost in a given week the less they would lose or the more they would gain the next week. We are extremely good at keeping our behavior in weight balance whether we like where its balanced or not. In fact, this is a major reason why most diets fail and why inherently then people dont become recklessly generous after making one donation. Indeed our inherent balancing act of food with bad extends far beyond food eating and we make poorly responsive decisions and was back to my life it can make us feel entitled to act immorally in others. I now will move back to the senses and talk about my favorite sense which is the sense of smell and review a section called aroma craving distractor. In 2013 a study conducted in the United Kingdom exposed women were trying to diet to the sense of fresh oranges or chocolate at two different session separated by at least one week. The women fasted for at least two hours prior to coming in for the experiment and either unwrapped chocolate or broken into pieces or segmented in orange with a knife. In each case they inhaled the aroma that was released several times. It was then removed and participants next had a snack reading test. Fresh orange slices, pieces of cereal bars in the same type of chocolate were placed on a tray and participants were told to help himself to his much as each bit as they needed in order to judge how good it was and how much they wanted to eat it. The participants then came back a week later were exposed to the aroma they hadnt previously spelt. Either orange slices or chocolate and to the same food rating task. No differences were found. On the day and when the participants felt fresh oranges they consumed 60 fewer calories than the snack test on a than they did when the small talk. One explanation for why smelling fresh orange produced subsequent taking her to chocolate is that since aroma sparked the emotion and Memory Centers of our brain the sense of oranges cute and motivational memory reminding the dieters of their longterm weight loss goals resulting in controlled intake. Great food aroma [inaudible] alternatively the sense of chocolate was so learning that participants were driven to eat above and beyond because they couldnt resist the chocolate aromas deliciousness compared to the orange sense. Chocolate is by far the most craved food in western culture especially in women. Tempting to resist that only increases the temptation. Once you become [inaudible] on chocolate thinking about it more treats the craving instructor. These attempts at the university in australia conducted several experiments and found that non chocolate aromas indeed specifically nonfood aromas help reduce cravings for chocolate and other treats by intruding into are elaborated food fantasies. In the first study presented colleges with 30 highresolution photographs of appetizing chocolate delights. Such as chocolate cake and brownies. Each paragraph is displayed for five seconds and dispenser told to think about the food and how much they wanted to eat it in the following eight seconds. While they were thinking about the food they just think they