Experiments show people who feel socially inferior yearn for fattier foods

(Medical Xpress)—A pair of researchers affiliated with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found that when people are made to feel socially inferior, they tend to crave fattier foods. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bobby Cheon and Ying-Yi Hong describe four studies they carried out that led to the same conclusions—feelings of social inferiority can cause people to want to eat more food and food that has a lot of fat in it.

Prior research has shown that people on the lower end of the economic spectrum tend to be more obese than those higher up, the researchers note, but there has been little consensus regarding the actual cause of it. In this new effort, the pair conducted experiments that showed that the likely factor was feelings of inferiority.

The four studies consisted of asking volunteers to imagine their place on a social/economic ladder—some were asked to see themselves as residing at or near the bottom while others we encouraged to see themselves as existing near the middle or top of the ladder. The volunteers were then asked to fill out a questionnaire regarding their desire for food at a buffet and to describe what types of food they most wanted to eat. One of the studies involved inviting volunteers to an actual buffet and allowing them to eat from a choice of foods.

The researchers report that those volunteers who were asked to imagine themselves at or near the bottom of the social ladder not only imagined themselves eating more at the virtual buffet, but actually ate more when offered the real thing. In addition, the same group was also found to both desire fattier foods and to consume them when given the chance compared to other volunteers in the study. These findings, the researchers claim, show that it is often feelings of inferiority that cause economically challenged people to eat unhealthy foods, which leads to weight gain. The researchers suggest such a reaction could derive from an adaptive history when it made more sense for people without a reliable food source to eat more when it was available and to focus on those foods that were the fattiest because it would be the best choice for adding fat that could later be burned during lean times.