Mice switched from cocoa to cinnamon after watching peers eat it, a change driven by the posteriomedial amygdala. Nick Norwitz explains how this brain region shapes food preferences in humans too, meaning your eating habits are heavily influenced by who you eat around. Surrounding yourself with people who model healthy eating can rewire your own food preferences.
Wouldn't you love to be able to change your food preferences? Socially transmutate them? But it gets very technical. Transferred via social learning in this mouse model, a healthy food that you don't enjoy nearly as much. How is this relevant to you? Okay, hang in there with me for a moment and engage in this thought puzzle. Imagine your favorite unhealthy food. Maybe it's french fries, or pizza, or ice cream. I used to really love pecan pie. Now, hold on to that temptation in your mind. Imagine it in your mind's eye. And now, imagine a healthy food that you don't enjoy nearly as much. Maybe you don't like salmon, or eggs, or Brussels sprouts, or liver, or whatever. Now, what if you could rewire your brain to like the unhealthy food less and like the healthy food more? Well, as it happens, you can, at least to some extent, and we're beginning to understand the neural, the brain circuits that explain how. So this video was inspired by new research in the journal Nature that shows how a newly defined circuit in the emotional brain, the limbic system, helps to consolidate and cement socially transmitted food preferences. And really importantly, and now I'm paraphrasing right from the paper, socially transmitted food preferences override innate food preferences. This paper, it's packed with fascinating data, but it gets very technical. Therefore, I'm going to do a very brief review of the experimental approach, which is going to be far shorter than normal for my channel. You might like that, you might hate that, you give me feedback in the comments. But then I'm gonna go and provide you with what I hope to be practical information that you can use in your real life. So, getting on to the paper, what the researchers did was take mice that are known to have an innate, inborn food preference for a given flavor. In this case, cocoa over cinnamon. The mice tended to like cocoa over cinnamon flavor. And then they exposed those mice, the cocoa-loving mice, to another mouse that had been forced to eat cinnamon while the cocoa-loving mouse observed. What resulted was a swap in preference, away from cocoa and towards cinnamon. Thus, the preference for cinnamon over cocoa was transferred via social learning in this mouse model. And I know, I know, things are always more complex in humans, and watching your sibling eat Brussels sprouts won't immediately make them appetizing to you. But hang in there, because 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. It was a region called—bear with me—posteriomedial nucleus of the cortical amygdala. The words aren't really important, I just wanted to give you the actual specific region that they identified in the paper. And by manipulating this region and/or the circuits in which it's involved, the researchers could toggle socially learned food preference, which is really cool on an academic intellectual level, but now how is this relevant to you? Well, while mice are much simpler than humans, admittedly, the brain regions involved are quite primordial and relatively conserved. We humans have amygdalas and limbic systems, and they drive much of our behaviors and preferences, including food preferences. And the broader truth here is one I mentioned at the beginning, that learned and socially learned food preferences can dominate over innate preference. And extrapolating, you are not locked in to liking X junk food or disliking Y healthy food. Those preferences may be largely constructed from 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 about this. I can't even tell you how many people I've seen who dislike a food or more broadly a way, a pattern of eating, and then they learn to love that pattern of eating after immersing in social settings with others who practice that way of eating and really enjoy it. My greatest personal exposure has been to this phenomenon in the context of low carbohydrate Or ketogenic diets, where one person in a group starts a low-carb or keto diet and loves the lifestyle, and then members of their social circle learn to love it through exposure. And I know, true, true, there are layers here. And it's likely that it's more, or at least a contributing factor, is a "don't knock it till you try it" phenomenon along with the positive associations constructed through positive health results one might get on a particular way of eating. But in a real-world setting, I don't see these as competing mechanisms, but complementary. So the point is, if you seek out and construct social interactions with people who eat the way you want to eat, and even enjoy the foods you want to enjoy, well, I think it's entirely reasonable, especially based on these data, to expect your brain could rewire So you can socially transmit onto yourself preferences that are to your benefit. I think that's pretty cool. Something for you to chew on. And as always, stay curious and thanks for listening. Thank you.
