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Anorexia is a condition that, like most other mental illnesses, we know very little about.
Psychologists know how they eat. They often restrict their calorie and fat intake. However, people don’t know how people with anorexia choose what little food they do eat.
Scientists wanted to know what would happen if people with anorexia were given lots of different food choices.
So they set to work. A study done on 42 women—21 healthy women and 21 who were recently hospitalized for anorexia nervosa—and observed them for two days.
The first day they were both given the same meal. The second day, they were given a choice of snack, where the choices varied between high-fat options like donuts to low-fat options like carrot sticks.
Healthy women chose higher fat options more often, and women with anorexia nervosa chose the low-fat ones, as expected.
Strangely, they found that the reward activity in their brain was the same for both groups. Those with anorexia appear to have trained their brains to feel the same reward for eating in their restricted way as healthy people would for a more filling snack.
The decisions made by those with anorexia were also more driven by the area of the brain associated with habit, rather than the area associated with making an educated decision.
This means that those who have had anorexia could fall back into bad habits easier, since the restricted eating is already a habit. But despite the fact that low-fat foods like veggies are healthier, people with anorexia are in danger of not eating enough of these healthy foods, and experiencing fat deficiency.
This study could help psychologists better understand how to treat those with anorexia.
