A research study on mindful eating

Recently there has been a lot of talk about incorporating mindfulness into our hectic, modern lives. Loosely rooted in the Buddhist practice of sati, mindfulness practitioners seek to improve their mental, physical, and spiritual health through meditation and conscious awareness. Through practice, mindfulness practitioners hope to respond to internal and external factors more thoughtfully and deliberately, thereby making better choices and maintaining more control of their emotions.

The evidence to support the effectiveness of mindfulness in dieting is strong, but our understanding of the underlying psychological mechanisms driving this progress so far has been weak. Seeing no contradiction between mindfulness’s ancient roots and modern scientific methods, Lieneke K. Janssen and her laboratory at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands investigated.

Janssen recruited sixty-five Dutch volunteers with a wide range of body mass indices (BMI) and motivation to lose weight but who were not actively dieting. Volunteers completed a “reversal learning task” designed to test their adaptability.

Here’s how it worked: A participant would be shown two playing cards on a screen. They had to determine which of two playing cards would be associated with a reward or punishment based on the card's suit. If they picked the right card, they would receive a positive response, including a smiling face emoticon, a +100€ sign, and a high pitched tone. If they chose incorrectly, they would receive a negative response, including a frowning face, a -100€ sign, and a low pitched tone. Here’s the catch — after answering correctly five times in a row, the reward rules would switch and a different suit would be associated with the positive response. The participant is graded on how quickly he or she can adapt to the new set of rules, a skill known as behavioral flexibility.

Following these tests, participants were randomly assigned either to eight weeks of mindful eating training or to an equivalent amount of educational cooking training, which served as an experimental control.

After the eight weeks of mindful eating or educational cooking training, the volunteers were once again put through the reversal learning playing card test. Janssen’s team found that the more time a person spent on mindful eating practice, the more they improved on the reversal learning test. Participants assigned to educational cooking, on the other hand, showed no reversal learning improvement dependent their time spent in training (but some improvement in diet composition).

To support any scientific claim that one thing causes another we usually want to also show how it happens. For example, sailors have known for centuries that eating limes while at sea would ward off scurvy. However, it was not until biochemists Charles Glen King and Albert Szent-Györgyi identified scurvy as a vitamin C deficiency that the lime treatment made sense: limes are packed with vitamin C. Similarly, we have known for some time that mindfulness can help people achieve their diet goals, but this experiment has shed some light on how.

The playing card test participants took was not only a test of whether participants could determine a set of rules analytically. It was also a type of training known as Pavlovian conditioning in which the subjects learn to associate things, in this case playing card suits, with positive or negative emotions. These “gut reactions” can be useful for making quick decisions, like how we associate an angry snarl with a threatening dog. Sometimes, though, we need to override our Pavlovian training with a more rational higher-order thought, like when we decline another cookie despite the delectable scent wafting from the oven. When Janssen’s team tested participants’ ability to adapt to new rules, they were really testing their ability to override their emotional, Pavlovian response to colors and shapes with the analytical part of their brain trying to make sense of the new rule set.

Janssen’s team demonstrated that people who are trained in mindful eating can more quickly adapt to those new rules. This suggests that those newly mindful people were better at suppressing their emotional reptilian brain’s responses in favor of their higher order conscious choices. When it comes to food, the mindful group should be able to make choices with their heads, rather than their stomachs about what and when to eat. So next time you sit down with a tube of Pringles to watch The Mountain on Game of Thrones run his enemies through, be mindful that you don’t end up eating like him.

Have thoughts on the research or know of related studies? Comment below or email us at hello@alpynelabs.com

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