Posted by Larry Hoover on January 4, 2006, at 8:31:03
In reply to A new therapeutic technique!?, posted by fires on January 3, 2006, at 20:52:31
> Now she and others have shown: "...that adults can be led to believe falsely that eating certain foods as children made them sick and that such false beliefs can have consequences."
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> http://tinyurl.com/ctt9k
>
> There's speculation that the above could be useful in diet modification, including that for weight loss.https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/bernsteinSocialCognition05.pdf?uniq=-g02nr5
Again, I'm not impressed. The percentage of respondents to the manipulation is quite low. Moreover, there are significant issues around the inability to exclude truthful recall of actual memories induced by the repeated questionnaire technique, as well as response to demand. As both of these confounds serve to increase the percentage responding, the technique is certainly not very effective. The authors claimed "marginal significance" for non-significant results, as it is.
Food avoidance is a limbic response. It has been shown to exist in unconscious subjects. I have an interest in the subject because I have an "irrational" food aversion. The smell of bananas (fresh, not cooked) is enough to make me gag. I've got it down to gagging. Earlier responses were, uhhh, more productive.
I discussed the subject with one of my professors after it came up in lecture. He had taken part, as a student, in a study of what we call Antabuse (disulfiram). Before it could be used on the public, it had to be tested. Antabuse causes violent vomiting after even trace exposure to alcohol.
This gentleman enrolled in the study, thinking he'd get some free booze. Maybe he'd be in the control group, eh? Thinking he'd enhance the potential prize even further, he asked for scotch, his favourite tipple. Well, he was in the disulfiram group, and he was sick for over 24 hours. To his dismay, the smell of scotch was enough to cause him to vomit, even after the drug had worn off. When I spoke to him, it was nearly 40 years later, and he still could not drink scotch.
It turns out that food aversion is mediated by aroma. I discovered that when I was unlucky enough to have banana oil as the product of a laboratory chemistry exam. Given a synthetic procedure, our grade was based in part on identifying the substance so synthesized. I identified my product all right, and projectile vomited across the room to emphasize the point.
I must have been very very sick after eating a banana as an infant. Did I choke on it (like on a hotdog chunk)? Was I fed banana when my stomach was not accepting any food? Who knows. I can eat cooked bananas. They smell different.
Back to these thought experiments. Aversion. Avoidance. I dunno. I don't know what they've shown here. It would be interesting to know if a single one of the subjects changed their actual food selections, rather than marks on a checklist.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:594922
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20051229/msgs/595105.html