Researchers believe they may have found a clue on how to help obese women given a new study that reveals heavy females have a deficit in reward-based learning when it comes to food.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology this past week, indicates obese woman have little issue with formatting accurate associations when the reward is money, but can't seem to make the same association with food.
"Our study shows that obesity may involve a specific impairment not in the processing of food itself, but rather in how obese individuals -- or at least obese women -- learn about cues in the environment that predict food," said Ifat Levy of Yale University, in a press release.
"This is not a general learning impairment, as obese women had no problem [learning] when the reward was money rather than food. An intriguing possibility is that, by modifying flawed associations between food and environmental cues, we may be able to change eating patterns."
The study revealed that when a food reward was offered, the female participants' powers of learning and decision making seem to fall short, and were not as high as women of normal weight.
"These studies showed that obese women struggled to make those predictions as accurately as normal-weight individuals or as obese men did when the reward was food, either pretzels or chocolate candies, as opposed to money. The gender difference came as a surprise to the researchers, who say they had expected to see a similar pattern in both obese men and women," states the release.
While researchers say more investigation is needed to determine what causes the learning deficit, one premise has to do with body image.
"It will be interesting in future studies to consider which comes first -- the learning impairment or the weight -- by testing individuals both before and after weight-loss interventions including bariatric surgery," states the release.
"Instead of focusing on reactions to the food itself, our results call for shifting attention to the way obese individuals learn about the environment and how they approach or ignore cues associated with food," the researchers write. "Rather than target these individuals' behavior with food, we suggest that a successful intervention should aim to modify their interactions with other cues that determine their eating patterns."
