Eating Attentively: Episodic Memory & Eating Behaviour

肥胖现在是影响大多数发达国家的一个重大生物社会问题。肥胖症的增加主要是由于人们进食量的增加造成的。然而，对于大多数人来说，单靠自己很难实现长期减少食物消耗，这是促进减肥所必需的。最近的研究表明，对最近进食经历的记忆是饮食行为的重要决定因素；通过对我们一天中吃了什么进行准确的记忆表征，我们可以更好地决定吃多少。这增加了开发针对最近进食的记忆的干预工具的可能性，以帮助人们吃得更健康。与此相一致的是，初步结果表明，通过确保人们对正在吃的食物的关注，鼓励人们以更专注的方式进食，可以改善对最近进食的记忆，减少人们倾向于吃的食物的数量。这些发现是有希望的，因为即使是适度减少食物摄入量也可以促进减肥，从而对健康和福祉产生积极影响。尽管有人认为记忆会影响食物的摄入，但这个过程是如何发生的还不清楚。如果我们能够理解“专心”饮食是如何减少食物消耗的，这可能会对公众健康有益。因此，现在需要对记忆如何影响进食行为进行彻底的调查。对最近进食的记忆由多个情节“元素”组成，比如对一顿饭的大小的视觉记忆，以及对一顿饭的填饱程度的记忆。了解哪些间歇性“因素”决定了我们摄入多少食物，并解释了为什么用心吃饭会减少食物消耗，这将为我们提供新的理论信息。这反过来也将使我们能够设计有效的干预工具，针对最近进食的记忆，这样我们就可以帮助超重的人少吃和减肥，这将对公众健康产生更广泛的好处。这项研究将首次从理论上解释对最近进食的记忆如何影响进食行为，以及“专心”的进食方式如何减少食物消耗。然后，这一新知识将指导一项转译的“现实世界”干预研究；从最初有希望的实验室研究中获得发现，并使用跨学科方法来测试是否可以将“专心饮食”原则应用于公共健康干预环境，以帮助超重者少吃和减肥。研究一和研究二使用实验室喂养方法来操纵和干扰最近进食的记忆，以测试和了解不同记忆元素对食物消耗的影响。研究3测试了最近进食的记忆目标，以及通过使用智能手机技术促进更“专注”的进食方式，是否可以帮助超重和肥胖的人吃得更少和减肥。本项目将解决一个重要的生物社会问题，并受益于跨学科的研究方法。在研究结束时，我们将更好地理解对最近进食的记忆是如何影响食物消费的，并检查这一新知识的应用相关性。这些新颖的见解将有可能帮助解决大多数发达国家面临的普遍肥胖问题。

Obesity is now a major biosocial issue that affects most of the developed world. Rises in obesity have been caused primarily by increases in the amount of food people have been eating. However, the long-term reductions to food consumption which are required to promote weight loss are difficult to achieve for most people on their own. Recent work has shown that memory for recent eating experiences is an important determinant of eating behaviour; by having an accurate memory representation of what we have been eating throughout the day, we can make better decisions about how much to eat. This raises the possibility of developing intervention tools that target memory for recent eating in order to help people eat more healthily. In line with this, initial results suggest that encouraging individuals to eat in a more 'attentive' manner, by ensuring attention is paid towards meals being eaten, improves memory for recent eating and reduces the amount of food people tend to eat. These finding are promising as even modest reductions to food consumption can promote weight loss and therefore have positive effects on health and well-being. Although it has been suggested that memory informs food consumption, how this process occurs is unclear. If we are able to understand how 'attentive' eating reduces food consumption, this may have public health benefit. Thus, a thorough investigation of how memory influences eating behaviour is now required. Memory for recent eating consists of multiple episodic 'elements', such as visual memory for meal size and memory for how filling a meal is remembered to have been. Understanding which episodic 'elements' determine how much food we consume and explain why eating attentively reduces food consumption will provide us with novel theoretical information. This in turn will also enable us to design effective intervention tools to target memory for recent eating, so we can help overweight individuals eat less and lose weight, which will be of wider public health benefit. This research will be the first to develop a theoretical account of how memory for recent eating influences eating behaviour and the process by which an 'attentive' eating style reduces food consumption. This new knowledge will then guide a translational 'real world' intervention study; taking the findings from initial promising laboratory studies and using cross-disciplinary methods to test whether 'attentive eating' principles can be applied in a public health intervention setting to help overweight people eat less and lose weight. Studies 1 and 2 use laboratory feeding methods to manipulate and interfere with memories for recent eating, in order to test and understand the influence that different memory elements have on food consumption. Study 3 tests whether targeting memory for recent eating and promoting a more 'attentive' approach to eating through the use of smartphone technology can help overweight and obese individuals eat less and lose weight. The present project will address an important biosocial question and benefit from cross-disciplinary research methods. By the end of the research we will have developed a better understanding of how memory for recent eating influences food consumption and examined the applied relevance of this new knowledge. These novel insights will have the potential to help tackle the widespread obesity problem faced by the majority of the developed world.