How Your Thoughts Can Fool You.
Let’s say you are hungry and looking in your kitchen for something to satisfy your craving. You find a frozen pizza and turn it over to look at the nutrition facts label. You see the calorie count per slice and the amount of trans fat it has. Reading the label starts to evoke particular thoughts in your mind. It could be something like, did I do enough movement today to deserve this pizza? Or maybe thinking eating this will make me feel better after a rough day you’ve had. Whatever it may be it's clear that certain thoughts are associated with certain behaviors.
Dr.Alia Crum a clinical psychologist from Columbia Business School in New York believed that, “labels are not just labels; they evoke a set of beliefs.” In her study “The Milkshake Experiment”, she was attempting to answer whether the information conveyed by a nutritional label could physically change what happens to us.
In the study, Crum created a huge batch of French vanilla milkshakes, then divided it into two batches that were labeled in two very different ways.
Half the stuff was put into bottles labeled as a low-calorie drink called Sensishake — advertised as having zero percent fat, zero added sugar, and only 140 calories.
The other half was put into bottles that were labeled as containing an incredibly rich treat called Indulgence. According to the label, Indulgence had all kinds of things that wouldn't benefit your upper thighs — including enough sugar and fat to account for 620 calories. In truth, the shakes had 300 calories each.
Both before and after the people in the study drank their shakes, nurses measured their levels of a hormone called ghrelin.
Ghrelin is a hormone secreted in the gut. People in the medical profession call it the hunger hormone. When ghrelin levels in the stomach rise, that signals the brain that it's time to seek out food.
After your ghrelin rises, and you have a big meal (say a cheeseburger and a side of fries), then your ghrelin levels drop. That signals the mind, Crum says, that "you've had enough here, and I'm going to start revving up the metabolism so we can burn the calories we've just ingested."
On the other hand, if you only have a small salad, your ghrelin levels don't drop that much, and your metabolism doesn't get triggered in the same way.
If you believed you were drinking the indulgent shake, she says, your body responded as if you had consumed much more.
"The ghrelin levels dropped about three times more when people were consuming the indulgent shake (or thought they were consuming the indulgent shake)," she says, compared to the people who drank the sensible shake (or thought that's what they were drinking).
"Our beliefs matter in virtually every domain, in everything we do," Crum says. "How much is a mystery, but I don't think we've given enough credit to the role of our beliefs in determining our physiology, our reality. We have this very simple metabolic science: calories in, calories out."
People don't want to think that our beliefs have influence, too, she says. "But they do!”
Therefore, what we can learn from this study is the impact our belief system has on many of the life choices that we make. Many difficult things in life are unavoidable but how was choose to think about it and perceive it is a way for us to have some control.
Perna, S., Spadaccini, D., Gasparri, C., Peroni, G., Infantino, V., Iannello, G., ... & Rondanelli, M. (2022). Association between des-acyl ghrelin at fasting and predictive index of muscle derangement, metabolic markers and eating disorders: a cross-sectional study in overweight and obese adults. Nutritional Neuroscience, 25(2), 336-342.
Crum, A. J., Corbin, W. R., Brownell, K. D., & Salovey, P. (2011). Mind over milkshakes: mindsets, not just nutrients, determine ghrelin response. Health Psychology, 30(4), 424.
