According to a new study, breakthrough research sheds light on what promotes people’s basic food preferences which show that our choices may be smarter than before and influenced by specific nutrients, compared to the calories we eat.
The research findings were published in the journal ‘Appetite’ by Jeff Brunstrom who is the lead author and Professor of Experimental Psychology and Mark Schatzker at the University of Bristol.
The international study sets out to test and re-examine the widely held view that humans have evolved to favour energy-dense foods and that our diets are balanced just by eating a variety of different foods. Contrary to this belief, the findings revealed that people now have ‘nutritional wisdom’, whereas foods are selected to meet our need for minerals and vitamins and avoid nutritional deficiencies.
According to Jeff Brunstrom, the results of the studies are rather surprising and significant as for the first time in almost a century its seen that humans are more sophisticated in their food choices and are selected on the basis of specific micronutrients, instead of simply eating everything and getting what they need by default.
The paper gives new weight to the bold research that was carried out in the 1930s by an American paediatrician, Dr Clara Davis who had put a 15 babies group on a diet which allowed them to ‘self-select’, or eat whatever they wanted from 33 different food items, while no child had the same food combination and they all maintained and achieved a good health state that was taken as evidence of ‘nutritional wisdom’.
The findings were later criticised and scrutinised, but replicating the research of Davis was not possible because this form of experimentation would be considered unethical in today’s time.
As a result, its been nearly a century since any scientist has attempted to find evidence of nutritional wisdom in humans. So to overcome these barriers, a team by Professor Brunstrom developed a novel technique that involved measuring preference by showing people images of different vegetables and fruit pairings so that their choices could be analysed without putting their health at risk.