By MACROS | Published on June 13, 2017
Plenty of adults eat like a two-year-old, cherry picking the stuff they like without ever re-trying foods they think they don’t.
Fortunately, research in Nutrition & Diabetes found you could train your brain to actually prefer healthy low-calorie foods to the higher-calorie slop, so here’s how to train yourself to enjoy everything.
1. Chill or heat it
Try your least favorite foods both hot and cold. Research at Yale University found a food’s temperature has a huge bearing on its taste, though that probably won’t work with ice cream.
2. Change its color
A food’s color has a huge bearing on your brain’s reward centre. Let food coloring earn its keep. Juices and food with brighter colors made people enjoy the taste of foods more, found research at the University of Chicago Press Journals. Make your cauliflower dayglo green if you have to.
3. Burn calories to get it
Get it yourself and you’ll be more likely to enjoy it. Research at Johns Hopkins University found that we appreciate a food’s taste more if we have to work to get it. Don’t have a veggie patch? Eat your hated foods after a grueling workout or walk to the shop to get it and your brain or body won’t know the difference.
4. Look at pictures of high-calorie foods while you eat
This strategy was proven to change people’s taste perceptions, found research in the journal PLOS ONE. Best not to do this during a friend’s dinner party though.
5. Add some fat
You’re hard-wired to enjoy high-calorie, fat-rich foods, found research at Purdue University. Drizzle some olive oil on your sprouts and you might start to like these nutritional powerhouses.
