Junk food is twice as distracting as healthy food — but there’s a trick to resisting it

By Sam Downing|

A new study proves why you should never go to the supermarket hungry.

You know how when you hitthe supermarket with an empty stomach, you always end up buying Tim Tams you would’ve resisted if you weren’t hungry?

A new study might have confirmed why that is, finding junk food is super distracting to your brain — until you’ve eaten some of it.

Howard Egeth and Corbin Cunningham, psychologists from Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, devised a quirky experiment to explore the siren song of calorie-dense, low-nutrient foods.

Participants in the research were given a computer task that involved quickly identifying whether sets of symbols were letters or numbers.

During the not-very-exciting game, photos flashed on the periphery of the screen for a fraction of a second — too fast for the players to consciously register what they’d seen. The images depicted a mix of junk food (such as doughnuts, potato chips, cheese and candy), healthy foods (carrots, apples and salads) or random objects (bicycles, lava lamps and footballs).

“We wanted to see if pictures of food, particularly high-fat, high-calorie food, would be a distraction for people engaged in a complicated task,” said Egeth in a statement.


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A second experiment indicated how to diminish the power junk food has over us. Egeth and Cunningham recreated the same conditions as the first experiment, but this time fed participants two fun-sized chocolate bars before the computer task.

Snacking on the chocolate made the images of junk food no more distracting than the healthy food and the other objects — though it’s yet to be determined if only eating junk food cancels out junk food’s allure.

“But what if we gave [study participants] an apple? What if we gave them a zero-calorie soda? What if we told the subjects they’d get money if they performed the task quickly, which would be a real incentive not to get distracted?” Egeth mused.

“Could junk food pictures override even that?”

Cunningham said the study suggests that even when you think you’re hard at work, food — especially junk food — is always tugging at your attention.

“What your grandmother might have told you about not going to the grocery store hungry seems to be true,” he said. “You would probably make choices that you shouldn’t or ordinarily wouldn’t.”

The study is published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

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