#621: Hedonic Overeating, Food Wanting and Impact of Perception – Prof. Graham Finlayson

0:00Danny Lennon: Hello and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 621 of the podcast. My name is Danny Lennon. You're very welcome to the show. Today we're going to be taking a look at a number of different concepts that are interrelated but have a big impact on how we eat, how much we eat, and certainly in situations of driving overeating or enjoyment of food. And this comes from some of the work done by today's guest, Professor Graham Finlayson, who's Professor of Psychobiology at the University of Leeds. And his research focus has been on human appetite, food reward, and some of the psychological processes that are involved in our eating behavior, and therefore how much or what types of foods we may consume.

0:49Danny Lennon: And so what we really want to get into, and some of his excellently published work can speak to some of these questions relates to why nearly all of us tend to point to certain types of foods or combinations of foods that can feel very difficult to stop eating, that really drive us to overeat them, overconsume them because of how enjoyable we find them. Now when we try and get down to defining that within a research context, this relates to some concepts that have been discussed previously. So for example, the concept of food reward or finding a food rewarding. However, within this, there's important distinctions to be made.

1:26Danny Lennon: And sometimes the terminology can be left a bit vague or can overlap with other ideas. And Professor Finlayson has done a great job of trying to distinguish between them and actually test specifically these ideas. So for example, we're going to look at what we would mean by liking a food versus what we mean by wanting a food, and then how we layer in the concepts of this perception of how easy it is to overeat. And as we'll explore, some of this work looks at not only the nutritional composition of foods, but really makes a strong case that's only just one part of this equation. And other things like sensory characteristics or learned beliefs, or even the eating context we're in, can shape some of this hedonic overeating that occurs.

2:11Danny Lennon: So we're going to go through all of these concepts with Professor Finlayson today. In the description box we are currently listening, you'll be able to get a link to any of the useful resources to this episode, including some of the published work from Professor Finlayson that we're going to get into throughout this conversation. If you are a Sigma Nutrition Premium member, you will get a set of detailed study notes to accompany this, which will go through all the key terms, explain any concepts that have been gone through, recap that with diagrams, etc. And so you'll have all of the information within this to be able to dive a bit deeper into it, as well as to revise over it quickly as well.

2:48Danny Lennon: If you're listening on the free public feed of the podcast that are interested in getting more out of your podcast listening by getting access to the extra educational resources we have from our premium members, so for example, the study notes you get to each episode, an edited transcript, our premium exclusive episode that comes out each month, as well as an ability to ask us questions which we answer on special Q &A style episodes, then check out what we offer with a Sigma Nutrition premium membership. I'll put details on that in the description box where you're currently listening, or you can find that over on sigmanutrition.com and is the direct way that you can support the work we do on the podcast.

3:26Danny Lennon: So this podcast is not an ad revenue model. We are completely supported by you, our regular listeners who go on to be premium subscribers. So it's very much appreciated for any of you who do that or any of you who are considering do that. So thank you so much for that. without any further ado let's get into this conversation between myself and professor graham

4:02Danny Lennon: big welcome to the podcast to dr graham finlison thank you so much for taking the time to come and join me today oh it's a pleasure yeah it's good to be here thanks for inviting me the pleasure is all mine i've been really looking forward to this i've read a number of your publications over a span of multiple years now and i think on this podcast previously we've actually discussed some of your work so it's great to be able to talk to you directly about it today before i get into any of my questions for people listening could you maybe give them an idea of your academic background your main research interests and anything else you think might be relevant for to know.

4:38I'm a professor in psychology at University of Leeds. My interest in sort of research topic has always been in the area of eating behavior and human appetite. We're interested in the mechanisms that drive how hungry we feel, that are related to how we form sort of preferences for one food over another, things that drive our food choice. And most often that's looked at in relation to the reasons why people tend to overeat, sort of lose control over their appetite, as well as the sort of factors that improve and predict people's appetite control. We study humans. We have a lab where we can measure people's eating behavior and have run clinical trials and interventions to look at how factors to do with food or to do with lifestyle or physical activity exercise impact people's appetite.

5:32Danny Lennon: Fantastic. And that was one of the main areas we're going to try and focus in on today from going from broadly some of these characteristics that can drive overeating or at least have some impact on that. And within that, when we get to some of the concepts that we will mention probably throughout this conversation, there's a number of different terms that tend to cluster together, but maybe some people aren't aware of the differences or the specific nuances between them that we might have to parse because we might be talking about things from reward to wanting to perception as we get to a bit later on.

6:06Danny Lennon: If we start maybe with one of the ones that has been a common term that a lot of people have heard relates to this concept of food reward. And so if we think of what is it to say that a food is rewarding as such, what are we exactly claiming? What do we mean by such terminology? it's a good question because when we think of you know a food or anything as as rewarding we tend to think in terms of the pleasure that that thing brings to us and we can often think of it as a property that is kind of inherent to that thing so when we talk about food reward we're really talking about the value that makes a food attractive to us and we can derive pleasure from But even I'm aware kind of talking about it in a sense, there's kind of a few terms and different ways of looking at reward.

6:55And one of the things that we now kind of understand and recognize about food reward is that it's not just one thing. It's not just kind of a unitary sort of construct that you can measure that goes from no reward to lots of reward. It actually consists of components. And one of the ways that we find it useful to kind of separate out and measure food reward is to look at it in terms of the liking component. So liking is how pleasurable we actually experience the food to be, the sort of hedonic impact it's sometimes called. And then another component of reward, which is separable and separate from liking, is the extent to which we want it.

7:37So that's more to do with the motivational pull that a food has. So how literally how attractive it is to us, how much it grabs our attention, how much it kind of pulls us towards it and makes us want to kind of choose and then ultimately consume it. So they're two separate components, but they also are things that that will tend to go together. So naturally, if you like something, then you want it. If you want something, then it's usually because you you like that thing very much. And so frequently they're not really distinguished very much or measured separately. And what my research over the years has been interested to kind of look at more closely is, are there situations where those processes don't always do the same thing, where they might separate from each other a little bit, where an intervention might have an impact more on one of those components than another?

8:32And if that's the case, then what's the functional significance of that? so what you know does it does it actually impact outcomes which might be related to health or might be related to behavior with food in in the real world so we can look at food reward as a global construct but also i think it's interesting and useful in some situations to try and tease

8:54Danny Lennon: apart the components that make up food reward and this really is an important point because i think if a lot of people go and actually look at some of your very early work you were kind of at the forefront of trying to make that distinction between the liking and wanting in humans and this kind of need to have a separate measure essentially that while we have as you mentioned this useful construct around food reward having these separate components that may be important to give us information separately so based on that subsequent work of looking at liking and wanting and even within that we can maybe think of different types of that wanting that implicit and explicit within those and you said this need to go and try and measure them separately and this may give us some more independent or different information is that what you see then borne out are these things actually giving us this distinct different information and what kind of how independent are they from one another for lack of a better phrase i think that that is the thing so Most of the time, they are processes that go together.

10:00They'll co-vary. So I think under normal circumstances, one will be very highly predictive of the other. I think what's interesting is that there are certain circumstances or certain phenotypes, if you like, or types of people where they're not so strongly correlated with each other. So in some of our work, for example, we've been interested in looking at people who tend to binge eat and have a kind of binge eating phenotype and those individuals are characterized by particularly strong wanting for certain types of food for sort of combinations of high fat and sweet foods and it's the wanting component that is most predictive of their food choices most associated with over consumption in that group more so than than their liking for food so that's one kind of phenotypic example and then there are other examples in terms of external like interventions that people can undergo which also can tease apart or create differences in liking and wanting you can also see it in more natural situations if you think about when we eat a big meal and it kind of suppresses our hunger the other phenomenon that occurs is it tends to decrease the pleasure that we get from that food as well so there's something called sensory specific satiety which reduces the liking for that food which has just been consumed and i think that's also an interesting situation where you can see that liking and wanting can stop tracking so closely and in some individuals in some situations you can get a kind of residual wanting or a motivation which is preserved and lingers and is more predictive of subsequent eating and overeating so it's kind of situations like that of like extreme satiracy or people here are susceptible to a maritain where liking and wanting might not be so sort of tightly bound together and this is

11:56Danny Lennon: really useful so so if maybe we stick on this for for a moment because you said that in the maybe the majority of cases we have this kind of coherence between them that they're typically going to track relatively well together but there is this other times where there's maybe some of this discordance going on where they don't kind of track together as such and maybe we have one of those driving more of that behavior the end the other and you give this example i'm wondering can you maybe give people a couple more of those examples so that's clear in their mind of what what it actually looks like for there to be that kind of discordance where we have this high degree of liking or wanting or vice versa what might that actually look like in an individual just so people have an idea yeah i think that's one of the reasons why it's been a challenge to try and measure like and wanting separately in individuals because liking is a it's an experience and a feeling that's very commonly shared between people it's easy to talk about how much we like a food And if you ask someone the extent to which they like a food, then they find it quite a natural thing to be able to say on a rating scale or on some kind of indication that they can quantify in their mind.

13:16But wanting is much more difficult to, I think, get your head around as a consumer and everyday experience. So it's not as clearly something you can introspect on, at least not wanting in a sense that we mean it. So you mentioned earlier that there's implicit and explicit. And I think when we define wanting in terms of its motivational pull, there is a strong kind of implicit or unconscious component to that that people aren't necessarily aware of until it's happening or even after the fact. So I think in everyday experience, you can think of those times when we're consuming like a big bowl of chips or popcorn or something like that.

13:55And it becomes almost an automatic kind of repetitive, almost sort of compulsive behavior. You're not really aware of what's kind of bringing your behavior back and repeatedly eating it, but it just is. And it's kind of after the bowl's been finished, then you think, oh, God, it just really, you know, really needs to have those. I don't exactly know why, you know, it might even have been that pleasant for the person. so I think wanting something which is harder to capture and that's why we've our approach to try and get at that has been to measure it indirectly so rather than asking people how much do you want this food and try and explain what our definition what we mean by wanting kind of inverted comments we're trying to get that at sort of through their behavior and through behaviors and choices that they're not necessarily aware of and we do that by measuring the reaction time of their responses to pairs of feeds so i'm wondering can you talk a bit about those challenges

14:54Danny Lennon: because given this is a very difficult thing to measure and you are then trying to maybe we might use a metric like wanting to see does it say predict their their food intake and so based on that kind of challenge of getting these measurements and then being able to use that in this way how do you go about that and then from that perspective do we have good evidence around the that predictive power of wanting in this case relative to the subsequent food intake based on the measures you're able to collect i think one of the interesting things that we're in that we're finding is that wanting is is a very very strong predictor of what people are going to choose and the direction of their food choices and how then that translates into eating behavior.

15:43I think what is less consistent is whether wanting is going to really strongly predict how much they eat. When we measure changes in, we tend to measure changes in sort of hunger and fullness and liking and wanting before and after a food's been consumed. And then we can look at how those changes then predict subsequent intake and choice of foods. what we find is that wanting and liking and hunger all are associated with food intake but it's only really wanting that that gives us the the strongest kind of prediction of actually what they choose if it's going to be a sweet food over a savory food or a high fat food over a low fat food so i think it's definitely giving us something that's a bit additional to what we can lean from measures of just standard liking and hunger.

16:35Danny Lennon: One of your publications that I wanted to raise, and I'll link to this in the description for people listening, was a paper you published last year, Food Level Predictors of Self-Reported Liking and Hedonic Overeating. There's a number of things to get into here, but from the outset, this seems like you were trying to approach this as a really interesting research question that seemed maybe slightly different to some of the previous work can you maybe talk about the specific research question or questions you were interested in with this publication and where that kind of thrust to to get at them came from yeah that's so there's a few things that kind of inspired this work and and one of them was really a desire to get beyond measuring people's responses and perceptions of individual foods so when typically we will bring people into a lab and they'll be given like a meal or a preload you know a particular sort of food product and then we can make inferences about that food compared to a control feed but we realize that foods are extremely complex and they vary along so many different variables that it would be worthwhile trying to capture broader dimensions of those characteristics of feeds.

17:52And we realized that we couldn't really do this just using that kind of laboratory setup because it's not possible to expose people to all the foods in the diet. So part of what this research was trying to do was get a more kind of representative sense of a large enough pool of food that they can represent the diet, at least in the UK. So part of this work was mapping from a database of, we had over 60 ,000 foods and then representatively sampling down to, I think we had about 300 foods in the end that were sort of sufficiently diverse in terms of their, you know, macronutrient composition, their sensory composition.

18:40and then having that number of foods it means that when we collect data on those we can we can test across those sort of food level properties in a more representative way than we can just looking at an individual food or foods one at a time so that was part of it is to get more of a sense of the dimensions of of foods and the properties of foods themselves and the other thing we wanted to to look at with this with this research was to look at what translates the reward value of food into it then being overeating because just having a strong liking for a food doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be a risk factor for overconsumption or subsequently obesity so we wanted to ask people of all these different foods that they were raising not just how pleasant our food was but also what we now have sort of termed in the paper hedonic overeating which is basically the extent to which they would associate a particular food with eating too much because of how pleasurable it is so we're trying to sort of link those two things together so it's pleasurable but it's pleasurable to the extent that i can't control how much i'm eating of it and i've eaten too much so that's really what we mean by hedonic overeating and so what we did in the research was we were looking at firstly the extent to which liking and just classic ratings of pleasantness overlapped with this construct of hedonic overeating because just sort of testing the idea that are they one the same thing or do they differ and then secondly we wanted to see what it was about the properties of food on a sort of nutritional level but also on a more kind of psychological level in terms of how people perceive the food not just what the foods are actually made of what is it about foods that predicts on the one hand how much they're liked then on the other hand how much they are liked and wanted too much which will subsequently

20:35Danny Lennon: cause them to avore eat so there's within this paper when people go and read this they'll see there's a really a number of really interesting things to get into and the maybe the one of the first places i wanted to start was with you went and decomposed foods into these nutritional characteristics and then based on some of those properties we're trying to see do we have these predictors of this hedonic overeating which as you've just outlined is distinct from liking in itself which is that important piece of nuance and so again maybe if we start working through some of the things that you did find from the the analysis with relation to some of those characteristics what did you see emerge most consistently maybe as some of those predictors yeah so we did this in stages really because we didn't we didn't just want to kind of flood the models with with all the variables that you can kind of extract from food so we distinguish between what we call nutritional level variables so this is the actual nutritional content of the food like its energy density it's protein content fiber things like that so that that we constructed like a model which only contained those hard objective nutritional properties to begin with and when we looked at the predictive value of those nutritional models for predicting liking and hedonic over-eating, we found that they weren't able to, so just from the nutritional characteristic of feed, we could capture, I think it was about 20 % of the variance in the extent to which people said they liked to feed, for example.

22:10And I'm going to have to check these numbers, but I think it was similar levels for hedonic over-eating as well. So we can significantly capture variance, but then what we wanted to see is if we then add some of the perceptual or sensory characteristics of the food on top of just the nutritional proxies, can we explain additional variants in liking hedonic avaritis? And I think what surprised us was just the extent to which these sort of perceived characteristics of food did extend our models and predicted much more variants. So sort of 40 to 60%, I think,

22:49Danny Lennon: additional variants on top of those nutritional characteristics what it's suggesting to us is you can understand how much the food is liked to a certain degree from its nutritional characteristics but you can understand much more if you combine those nutritional characteristics with more kind of psychological perceptual sort of aspects of the food so its sensory properties and and how it's perceived in terms of its nutritional content a few things on that one that maybe for people right now is connecting back to the very first question we discussed of what is it to say a food is rewarding maybe now people are starting to get that idea well to think of that in terms of something inherent to the food now almost doesn't make much sense because we we can't say this is or not something i know we're not talking about reward in this sense but it's still not something that is if in and of its food in a universal sense we have to layer on that particular person the perceptions that are happening out in one time etc the other thing that you you noted is that when we do layer in some of these hyper characteristics that we see this greater variance just so people are clear what is the implications of that what is that telling us when we have this greater variance when we add in this extra layer of these characteristics?

24:11It kind of throws an interesting like, what do we mean by liking? What do we mean by reward? So I think as you say, it's not an inherent property of the food itself. It's not something that emerges from the physical constituents or the nutritional constituents of food. It's a property that emerges from the combination and the interaction of the individual, you know, the state that you are in at the time, your whole background and makeup in terms of what you're bringing to the eating situation and the context you're in and also the environmental context as well so a food might be highly liked and enjoyable and rewarding in one set of circumstances but then of no particular interest and less enjoyable in in another set of circumstances you know depending on maybe like the social occasion or the temperature you know there's there's so many things that can influence our enjoyment of food and how much we like it so i think some of the implications of this is that we can predict a certain amount of how much a food is liked from its nutritional composition but we get a much better picture and with much more kind of predictive accuracy if we layer on top of that some of the perceptions and the way that people actually perceive the feeds and not just what the food consists of and so part of this is obviously these beliefs people

25:34Danny Lennon: may have about particular foods and this in of itself is interesting and maybe maps onto other work in that area as well and so again for us to be kind of clear with people is it then foreseeable that we could have two situations where based on differing beliefs about that food then that in of itself is driving these differences in how they're liked wanted etc and then subsequently how that changes our behavior yeah yeah i think that's exactly right you can be cued in a completely different way to anticipate a food having a particular effect that that will actually have an influence on the pleasure and and how much that food is then is then like obviously you mentioned that that first layer was looking at these straight objective nutrition characteristics and then we've looked at some of these perceptual components.

26:24Danny Lennon: One of the interesting parts here as well, when we think about modern nutrition discourse and where there's a lot of debate still within nutrition science right now is related to the concept of ultra-processing as is typically defined by NOVA classification. And this was another really interesting part that you took account for in the analysis and looked at that ultra or that degree of processing as determined by that NOVA classification and to see what if any role or explanative power that had can you maybe walk us through some of the results there and then what you feel the implications of that may be so there's a couple of things that we wanted to look at or sort of take the opportunity to look at as we had sort of collected this data and so we had a huge number of foods a huge number of kind of ratings on those foods and and all the kind of nutritional characteristics of the foods you know fairly well measured.

27:18A couple of things we're able to do from that data firstly was to classify the foods according to the NAVA criteria for ultra processing. So we used the NAVA methodology to classify foods as either ultra processed or non-ultra processed essentially and we had enough foods in each of those categories to sort of run statistical comparisons. So it was worth looking at and we're interested to look at the extent to which ultra-processing was associated with with our outcomes of liking and hedonic aberriting because it's one of the things that has been it's discussed a lot in the literature on ultra-processed foods but there's very little data that's one of the reasons why ultra-processed foods are detrimental to health is because they possess this very rewarding property and it's termed hyperpalatability often it's talked about in those terms so we're really curious about well what first of all what do people mean like what is hyperpalatability and is this something that we can capture with our measure of hedonic overeating because it's it's reward driven and it's reward driven eating which which leads to kind of overeating so there seems to be some kind of overlap there ultra processed food has been specifically kind of identified as operating by this mechanism.

28:44So that was one thing that we wanted to look at. And then the other way that hyperpalatability has been examined in the literature is from unnatural or unusual combinations of macronutrients in feeds. So one of them is if a food contains a sort of even ratio between fat content and carbohydrate content then you very rarely see this in nature and it's been proposed that the combination of fat the carbohydrate in that way has this kind of super additive impact on on reward and it's sort of super rewarding if you like and because we have you know the information on on on the macronutrient properties of this feed we could do quite a nice analysis of this particular proposition that the carbohydrate to fat ratio is more rewarding than just carbohydrate on its own or fat on its own.

29:38So we ran those as separate analyses actually. We had ultra-processed food in our models on the one hand and then we had carbohydrate to fat ratio as a sort of additional predictor in our models. And interestingly what we found, although there is sort of a basic bivariate correlation between ultra-processed food and liking ultra-processed food and donica eburita, in the context of the other sort of variables in our nutritional models, they actually added very, very little additional predictive variance in our analyses. So I think for ultra-processed food, we ran this in three separate large survey studies.

30:18The range of variance that was accounted for, in one study, it was zero and then in the sort of strongest effect it had was was only accounted for seven percent of the variance and then with carbohydrate to fat ratio it was even lower so that it was accounted for almost none like zero to two percent of the variance in hedonic overeating once you account for the nutritional properties of the feed if we take those in parts because these are

30:46Danny Lennon: really important and i think speaks to where much of this debate certainly as it relates to UPFs right now, centers within nutrition of not whether we see these associations with health outcomes or not, it's using this and particularly in specifically the NOVA classification, is that giving us more useful information than some of the other markers that we've typically used or the other characteristics around food that we can layer in, not only the nutrients per se, but some of the other things that we've discussed here today related to what might be driving overeating and is there something then uniquely important or useful about these classifications that would go above and beyond that and from some of this data as you've outlined we can see that it's at least here not really adding anything to that picture once we account for those other things which then leaves us again with this question of well what are we what are we really getting at by trying to use this and is this the the road we want to go down again that might be a conversation for another day we don't have to get necessarily off track but i think it's really useful to have analyses like you and your group have done with the level of rigor that there is and thinking through these set pieces because it can get us closer to understanding do we are we actually getting something from this or or not i think you put your finger on an important question we need to be asking ourselves really which is what is the utility of this classification and of this way of kind of categorizing foods and if its utility is explaining why foods kind of lead to negative health consequences and lead to overeating then i think that's the useful thing but i think the problem is when with ultra-processed food that it's it's a very kind of simple way of categorizing foods which now are extremely complex and vary in in many different ways in terms of you know nutritional properties sensory properties you know not to mention like the processing itself which can which is can vary in many different ways and i think the danger is that in looking at huge numbers of groups of food under under one label or one classification you're kind of losing a lot of the information that can tell you about sort of mechanism and why they're leading to negative health consequences or why there's a tendency to overeat foods which come under that classification and I can see why it's compelling to have a simple explanation for why some foods are not healthy and other foods are healthy and I think that can be sort of persuasive for influencing policy and for changing attitudes about about food and making people think more about how healthy their diet is but i think when we're trying to explain in a way things in terms of the mechanism for why a particular food might have lead to a particular diet might lead to a particular health consequence then it really does require a bit more nuance and understanding what is it exactly about the food or about the interaction between the food and the individual which is causing those negative effects perfectly said and i think it actually maps onto the same issue with the this carbohydrate to fat ratio in the sense that we can have a very simple classification here we'll just look at the macronutrient profile of different foods we'll just look at the ratio between these two different macronutrients and then group all the foods that fall under this type of ratio as this one global thing.

34:30Danny Lennon: We might notice some type of association. We can point to plenty of examples of foods that have this type of ratio that people maybe do tend to overeat. But then the misstep, I suppose, is going that step further and saying, well, this is the thing that's driving overeating. And that in any particular case where we have this certain ratio, we're going to have someone overeating. But again, as your analysis has shown that, well, when we take into account all the other things that we've discussed and that we know and these characteristics, all those complexities of food, which again makes it very difficult to do these measures, once we take those into account, we don't see the same predictive pattern.

35:08Danny Lennon: So we're almost falling into that same maybe overly reductionist or trying to simplify down something to a very nice, neat classification, whereas as you've outlined, unfortunately, foods don't really work that way and if we truly want to know mechanisms that's going to take a bit more elaborate and specific work over time you put it better than i can really but there's so much complexity in a food even and then when you think about that in the context of an entire diet then the complexity is just multiplied and it's very difficult to make these generalizations really that it's a particular type of food or particular type of diet that's having an impact because you you're then obscuring what the mechanism is.

35:51You know, you've got these strong associations and there are associations between, you know, ultra-processed food consumption and negative health consequences, but it's not really helping us get at the why. It's that that we need to understand if we're going to, you know, make changes at the food level.

36:09Danny Lennon: So with that said, with this particular publication that we've just discussed, just so we pull some of the things that we've just said together, what for you do you feel are the most important things that you would like people to take from that as they go through that paper what for you stands out as the most important implications or findings that we can get a give a quick overview of i think it's to put across the understanding that our liking of food and the extent to which we we're at risk of overeating of food it's multi multi-dimensional and there's there's many different kind of things which come together which which determine that the nutritional composition is one thing but it that's kind of one level of you know multiple influences that affect how much we like food you know as we said it's it's what you're bringing as a as an individual to the eating situation the context that you're in your sort of intel context as well as your environmental context all your kind of associations and learned interactions with different types of food and then we can layer on top of that there's also the sort of perceptual aspects of food as well and sort of cognitive factors and those all have a very real effect on our enjoyment of food you know it's not just the physical properties so i think it's trying to get a more holistic understanding really where food liking and in this case the donor cave reason comes from so in terms of the next big research questions that you would like to see answered either by you and your group directly or maybe others but in relation to anything we've discussed today what are some of those still interesting open research questions that you hope in the coming years we we might see some work done on i think really it's understanding the extent to which we can kind of take advantage or use differences in in liking and and wanting for food to have a measurable impact on on people's behavior so i think we don't know very much at the moment about what are the things we can modify about about the food or about an eating situation which is going to preserve the enjoyment that we get from that eating experience but not enhance or encourage the the motivational or you know wanting hedonic overeating side of things that mean that we're going to lose control over our eating and eat too much.

38:34So I think there's a lot still to be done really about trying to come up with interventions and sort of nutritional solutions that can allow people to kind of maximize the enjoyment and sort of preserve liking, but not cause overeating and to try and separately dampen that motivation to keep eating more.

38:53Danny Lennon: Fantastic. Very much look forward to seeing more of the work that comes out in this area. and again for people listening i will link up to the publication we mentioned today but also some of the other further background reading in this area from dr finlayson and his colleagues and anything else that might be relevant to that that you should go and check out and also keep up to date with the work that their group is doing so with that we come to the final question i always end the podcast on which can be to do with something even completely outside of what we've discussed up to this point and it's simply if you could advise people to do one thing each day that might have a positive impact on any area of their life what might that one thing be i'll just mention something that i've been kind of incorporating in in my daily routine it's really just to try and formally reflect on things so it'll be just before i go to bed i've got like a an ipad and a pen next to the bed and it's just to think over well what's gone well what's gone not so well and what's the the lessons have I taken away and how can I improve for the next day?

39:55And it's, it takes a few minutes. It's been quite an interesting exercise because it just helps to round some things off and just draw a line under maybe some, some like unresolved thoughts in your mind. So I found that really helpful.

40:09Danny Lennon: A brilliant way to round this out. Dr. Graham for the least. And thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk to me, but even more so for fantastic work that you've done and put out in the field. It's very much appreciated. So thanks for doing this. okay thanks a lot pleasure

40:35Danny Lennon: thanks so much for listening into today's episode before you go i just wanted to remind you about sigma nutrition premium our subscription for those of you podcast listeners who want to significantly deepen your understanding of nutrition science and become truly confident in your knowledge. So what's the idea of this subscription? Essentially, it was created with the goal of allowing you to more deeply understand the material you're hearing on the podcast episodes themselves, to be able to retain more of that after you've finished listening or reading through the notes, and then be able to easily and efficiently revise over that so that in the future you can be able to remember that information, to be able to reuse it, to be able to create your own content or ideas using things that you have learned.

41:22Danny Lennon: And how do we go about this? Well, there's a few different ways, but at the core of the subscription is our detailed study notes that you get to each episode that is full of all useful descriptions, background context, diagrams, charts, etc. to allow you to more deeply understand some of the concepts that were mentioned throughout that particular episode, as well as them linking them back to previous episodes. You also get the segments at the end of each episode called our key ideas segment, where I recap certain key ideas. You get episode transcripts. You get then a number of premium only episodes.

41:57Danny Lennon: Some of them might be ask me anything sessions where we answer your questions that you submit it directly, or they could be a variety of other episodes that you may have seen previews to in the public feed. so for full details on this then check out the link in the description box wherever you're currently listening right now or just go to sigmanutrition.com and you can see all the details there and of course your support is what keeps sigma nutrition going we don't run ads we don't sell supplements anything like that so your support is what allows me to continue to do this so thank you for that i hope you do come back for the next episode regardless and until then have Have a great week.

42:36Danny Lennon: Stay safe and take care.