Hungry? Your Brain Ignores Nutritional Info!

New research reveals that hunger shifts attention towards the tastiness of food, causing people to overlook nutritional information—a key factor in poor dietary choices. Using eye-tracking and computational modeling, scientists found that hunger amplifies the reward associated with calorie-dense foods, diminishing the importance of nutritional labels. This suggests that simply displaying nutritional labels might be insufficient to combat hunger-driven unhealthy eating. Interventions should focus on making health information more visually prominent or directing attention towards it.