Taste, Not Health, Is What The Brain Considers FIRST (And Likely ONLY)

According to recent research: https://today.duke.edu/.../when-taste-and-healthfulness...

When considering a food choice, the brain assesses for its choice FIRST the potential flavor of something, within only 400 milliseconds. Some time later (another 400+ms), it gets around to health considerations. Do keep in mind that an actual choice (or intent of action) is made within 350 milliseconds: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8391416/. Thus, while people BEGIN to contemplate IF they SHOULD have a healthy food, technically the intent to eat the unhealthy food has already been made. The choice is over before you think it’s begun.

Consequently, a lot of food planning advice is actually decent. That is, if you don’t have available in your home unproductive foods, your brain can’t easily trap you into destructive choices. But this does mean a reevaluation of macro purchases and grocery purchases. For example, imagine a person is going to need a mere 150g protein per day to make a stab at fitness. If he or she makes ONE trip to the store for food per week, he or she must obtain 1,050g worth of protein rations for just himself or herself. Anything less, and we can guarantee what is going to happen with execution of program. Average American food shopping doesn’t even get in the ballpark for this, even with weight loss food program deliveries.

So we can see that invoking the goodness of fresh food or having consciousness about less-processed items is entirely futile and useless when confronted with in-the-moment choice. The decision to eat something which can’t produce fat loss is made even before the brain begins uploading health considerations.

More succinctly, we cannot eat what isn’t there. We will eat what tastes good to us WHILE in complete knowledge that it shortens and worsens our lives. It’s not even a matter of willpower. It’s a matter of how we make certain items available ahead of time. One homework assignment I’ve had for clients before is to tabulate how many grams of protein, carbs, fat are available in their pantry, fridge, freezer. Even for large families, I find that the TOTAL protein available may be less than 500 grams, which is about what Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson eats in one day. For carbs, even among single people, they just tend to stop tabulating after around 10,000 grams. It doesn’t matter if you have iron will. If the ratio of productive macros is 5:1 in your detriment, what do you think is going to happen? You don’t even have a 50/50 chance at success. You have destined yourself to a statistical and neuroscience impossibility.
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We have to change that. Because NO ONE is going to get the 1-3 seconds of health beliefs to precede the 350-400 milliseconds that the decision has been made and the taste has been felt.